Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

We're going to look here at what's the correct start position and swing to you is when playing from a greenside bunker. So if you're in a greenside bunker, we need to learn how to play a splash bunker shot. That's the bunker shot where you're going to generate plenty of height getting the ball up over the lip of the bunker, but it's going to land really softly so it holes onto the grain, and it's going to allow you to really get closely to the pin.

So if we look out to setup to play that shot, initially because we want to generate height not distance with this shot, we're going to take you sand iron because it’s the most lofted club on the back, and then what we're going to do is going to open that clubface up. So open the clubface up, you want to look at the handle of the club, look at the name on the grip or the grip guide that's on the club there, on the club handle, and rotate it over to the right. So once it's rotated over to the right, the clubfaces now open aiming to the right, and now you can place your hands on correctly. And place your hands on halfway down the handle to give you more control of the club head as you swing.

So now we've opened the clubface up. As we come in to hit the shot we've got to reaim the clubface so it's pointing at the target because the clubface is 85% responsible for where the ball goes, so we need to get the clubface pointing at that target. So to do this, we're now going to rotate your body over to the left until we've got the clubface now pointing at where our target is, so effectively your body alignment is to the left of the target. But we're doing that to realign the clubface back at the target. We're going to take our stance up, and we're going to keep the ball in the middle of the stance as we do that maybe going to about just under shoulder with the par with the feet, and wriggle the feet into the sand, really were the feet down.

That's going to help lower you into the sand so that it will encourage you to get a club into the sand and under the ball, so also going to give you much more stability to hit the shot from, and wriggle in the feet and as well allows you to test the surface to see how much resistance, how much force you're going to have to put into the shot to play and effective bunker shot. So we've got the centered ball position. Keep the weight even. And for this splash shot if I turn this way on we're going to work on swinging the club back initially along the target line, and then around you, so and not particularly looking for a very high steep club head position.

We can have a nice flatter position with the club head and the shaft. And what this is going to allow us to do is attack back down towards the ball on a nice shallow angle. We're going to aim to strike about 2 inches to the right of the ball, so on the shallow angle with the strike into the sand we're looking to take a slitter of sand, not a really deep scoop, a nice slitter of sand, push that sand out of the bunker, and because the ball is on that sand, its going to push the ball into the air over the lip and give it a really soft land.

So when you're setting up to play, I'm just going to use this alignment pole just to represent that's where I'd be looking to strike the ball in the sand. I'd have the ball centered, I'm aiming my body left but that's to allow the open clubface to aim at the target and I'm going to work on swinging the club quite flat around my body, so it gives me a shallow angle back into the ball. I can strike 2 inches before the ball, scoop the sand out, that's slithered that's scoop at sand will push, moving that will push the ball into the air, and give you a really effective bunker shot. And just allow the club to finish, so the club head finishing in a nice high position. The body is rotated to the target, and that's the correct way to play from a greenside bunker.