Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro
There’s always a hope that the drive is going to be the most potent weapon in a golfer’s bag. It’s got the biggest club head. It has the biggest tee. It should be one of the easiest clubs to make good contact with. But due to the nature of having the longest shaft and the least amount of loft, a lot of golfers really struggle to make accurate and good solid contact with the ball. And one of the main reasons for that could be the fact that you’re dropkicking your drives.
So let’s investigate that term, dropkicking, what does that mean? Well, in other sports, a dropkick is where the ball bounces and then we kick it on the right hitting it on the way up. And it’s effectively that problem in golf is that the club will bottom out and then hit the ball on the way up. It’s effectively a fat shot. If you did this with an iron, the club would hit the ground, probably slowdown intensely, maybe bury itself in the ground and the ball will limp loosely forwards. In a driving scenario, very rarely will a drive ever dig into the floor because of the rounded nature of the sole and the large club head. It doesn’t really dig into the floor but it mostly bounces off the ground and into the back of the ball. And when that happens, the ball might still go in the air and it might still fly forward but it really won’t go very far at all. And that’s where it gets disappointing for the golfer. They’ve lined up with a nice big fairway up in front of them, got this big club head got the ball nicely teed up. But then as the club comes down into the floor, it bounces and then hits up. The ball doesn’t go as far as we’ve like it to and sometimes it can go offline as well. And I think a lot of the problems that are created with this dropkicking driver are caused by the golfer trying to hit up into the ball. Quite often as coaches, we talk about having the ball teed up right at the front of the stance and trying to hit the ball on the rise. But if the golfer gets too low, too far back behind the ball and then tries to hit up, we get this dropkick type of driver. So it’s basically a fat tee shot. If that’s the problem that you’re suffering with, this next little miniseries of videos is hopefully going to eliminate the dropped kick drives. 2016-10-12 Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro
There’s always a hope that the drive is going to be the most potent weapon in a golfer’s bag. It’s got the biggest club head. It has the biggest tee. It should be one of the easiest clubs to make good contact with. But due to the nature of having the longest shaft and the least amount of loft, a lot of golfers really struggle to make accurate and good solid contact with the ball. And one of the main reasons for that could be the fact that you’re dropkicking your drives.
So let’s investigate that term, dropkicking, what does that mean? Well, in other sports, a dropkick is where the ball bounces and then we kick it on the right hitting it on the way up. And it’s effectively that problem in golf is that the club will bottom out and then hit the ball on the way up. It’s effectively a fat shot. If you did this with an iron, the club would hit the ground, probably slowdown intensely, maybe bury itself in the ground and the ball will limp loosely forwards. In a driving scenario, very rarely will a drive ever dig into the floor because of the rounded nature of the sole and the large club head. It doesn’t really dig into the floor but it mostly bounces off the ground and into the back of the ball. And when that happens, the ball might still go in the air and it might still fly forward but it really won’t go very far at all. And that’s where it gets disappointing for the golfer. They’ve lined up with a nice big fairway up in front of them, got this big club head got the ball nicely teed up. But then as the club comes down into the floor, it bounces and then hits up. The ball doesn’t go as far as we’ve like it to and sometimes it can go offline as well.
And I think a lot of the problems that are created with this dropkicking driver are caused by the golfer trying to hit up into the ball. Quite often as coaches, we talk about having the ball teed up right at the front of the stance and trying to hit the ball on the rise. But if the golfer gets too low, too far back behind the ball and then tries to hit up, we get this dropkick type of driver. So it’s basically a fat tee shot. If that’s the problem that you’re suffering with, this next little miniseries of videos is hopefully going to eliminate the dropped kick drives.
