If you find yourself in the fairway but with some bad luck, you wind up in a divot, try getting out with your hybrid iron. The hybrid club has some very important advantages over a standard iron out of divots, here's why:
* Hybrids have a much wider sole than a standard iron given the golfer a better chance of gliding along the ground without slowing down from the grass or the ground.
* The leading edge of the hybrid is designed not to dig into the grass or ground, given you the best chance for solid contact.
* Hybrids have a center of gravity that is further from the face than a standard iron, and this will help get the ball up higher out of the divot.
* The hybrid golf club also is much more forgiving from heel to toe, given you a better chance of a quality shot.
Remember to play this shot with a hybrid iron you want to play it back in your stances and put extra weight on your foot that is closer to your target, which will give you more of a descending swing path.
Hybrid clubs are useful for a variety of jobs around the course
For instance, they are an excellent option when you need to hit an accurate tee shot, and they can be used nicely from the fairway as well. Also, you can employ the use of a hybrid club to play a bump-and-run from around the greens, and they can even hit punch shots on windy days. Once you have enough experience to use your hybrids in a variety of ways, you will quickly wonder how you ever played the game without them.
In this article, we are going to add another type of shot to the list – a shot played from a divot. When you find your ball sitting in a divot in the middle of the fairway, you are sure to be frustrated. It doesn't feel fair that you should have to play from such a bad lie after you have done a good job of finding the short grass. Well, it might not be fair, but it is how the game works. If you are in a divot, you are simply going to have to find a way out of that divot and up toward the green. Fortunately, if you have at least one hybrid club in your bag, you have a club that is well suited to deal with this situation.
Of course, even with a hybrid club on your side, it is still going to be difficult to play a successful shot from a divot. These kinds of shots have a reputation for difficulty for a reason. It's hard to make clean contact on the back of the ball when you are playing from a divot, and it is also hard to hit the ball in the proper direction. In order to pull off a quality shot in this situation, you are going to need to make a great swing – and you are going to need to get a little lucky, as well.
All of the advice provided in this article has been written from the perspective of a right-handed golfer. If you happen to play left-handed, please take a moment to reverse the directions as necessary.
Why Hybrids and Divots are a Good Match
First, we should make one thing clear – no golf club is really designed to play from a divot. You always want to be hitting your ball from a good lie, either on the fairway or from the tee, and your clubs are meant to handle those kinds of situations first and foremost. Hybrid clubs weren't designed to help you hit the ball out of divots, because this is a situation which (hopefully) only comes up once in a while. With that said, the way hybrid clubs are shaped does happen to make them pretty useful when your ball is sitting down in an old divot hole.
Let's take a look at three key features which help hybrid clubs perform decently even in this circumstance.
- Perimeter weighting. Since a hybrid club head is hollow, it has its weight located around the edges of the club. This makes it different than an iron club head, which is solid (in most cases) and has weight distributed throughout. Thanks to the perimeter weighting of a hybrid, you should have an easier time holding the head steady through the ball when hitting out of a divot. That doesn't mean the face is going to stay perfectly square to the target, of course – it is still likely to twist at least somewhat – but your average result should be better with a hybrid than it would be with an iron. Unfortunately, while you should see better results with your hybrids as compared to an iron in most cases, you can't make that statement across the board. Sometimes, you will have a lie in a divot which is best handled with an iron, especially one with a lot of loft. In other cases, the hybrid will be the right call. So, while we can say that hybrids are a good choice in divots on many occasions, that is not a statement which holds true in every single instance. You will have to gain experience and learn how to read the lie of the ball in the divot to determine which club is going to be best suited for the job.
- Get the ball airborne on a miss-hit shot. The chances are you will not be able to make great contact when playing from a divot. Since the ball is sitting down below the level of the surrounding grass, it's going to be tough to get down to the ball cleanly. That means, in most cases, the shots you hit from a divot will not be coming directly off the sweet spot. By using a hybrid club, you might be able to get the ball airborne even if you don't make great contact. A shot that comes off a little low on the face may still climb high enough to leave you with a respectable outcome. At the same time, shots hit off the toe or the heel may work out okay, as well. There is usually plenty of weight in the sole of a hybrid club head, helping to bring the center of gravity down and making it easier to get the ball to climb. You are still going to want to make the best possible contact on these kinds of shots, but it is nice to know that using a hybrid may help you achieve an acceptable result even when you miss the sweet spot.
- Compact club head design. Generally speaking, hybrids have a relatively compact head design, at least as compared to fairway woods. That makes them easier to use when playing from a divot, since you don't have that much room around the ball to swing through cleanly. The edges of the divot are likely to get in your way as you approach impact, so using a compact club head will improve your odds in terms of achieving a decent strike. Nothing about playing from a divot is about hitting a perfect shot, or even a pretty shot. It's all about advancing the ball safely toward the target so you can finish the hole is as few shots as possible. A hybrid might not allow you to strike an impressive, towering shot toward the target, but it is likely a better choice than a fairway wood when it comes to making solid contact.
We don't want you to have the impression that you can simply turn to your hybrid club when your ball is in a divot and everything will work out just fine. This is still an extremely difficult shot, and a hybrid won't always be the right club for the job. For example, if your ball is in a deep, narrow divot, it may be impossible to even get the hybrid down to the ball cleanly. In such a case, your best bet is probably to just pitch out of the divot and hope for a better lie on your next shot. Only when you think the hybrid can get to the ball reasonably well should you go in this direction.
Altering Your Swing
It is important to understand that you probably won't be able to make your normal swing when playing a hybrid shot out of a divot. You shouldn't have to change your technique dramatically, but it will usually be necessary to make at least a couple of adjustments. Since the ball is sitting down instead of resting up on top of the grass (or a tee), you'll want to modify the way you approach this shot.
The tips listed below are alterations you can use to improve your odds of a successful shot in this scenario. These changes are no guarantee of success, of course, but they should help more times than not.
- Choke down on the grip. In almost every situation where you are facing a tricky shot from a bad lie, you are going to want to choke down on the grip of the club. Choking down gives you an added measure of control, meaning you should have improved odds of making decent contact. You do sacrifice a bit of swing speed when making this adjustment, but that shouldn't be much of a problem here. You aren't expecting to get great distance when hitting a hybrid shot from an old divot hole, so giving up a few miles per hour on your swing is worth it. You don't have to choke down significantly to gain a benefit, as just coming down even an inch will help you guide the club head into impact more successfully.
- Move the ball back in your stance. One of the hardest things to do with a hybrid club when playing from a divot is to simply 'get to' the ball at impact. In other words, you have to make your way through the divot in order to actually strike the ball. This is going to be tough no matter what you do, but it will get a little easier if you move the ball back in your stance. This is going to cause your angle of attack to become steeper, meaning you should have an easier time contacting the ball before you lose too much of your swing speed to the turf. You don't want to line the ball up with your right foot or anything like that, but playing it from approximately the middle of your stance should be a good option.
- Keep it tight. You don't want to make a particularly long swing when hitting out of a divot. Instead, think like you are hitting a punch shot. Keep your backswing tight, stay nicely balanced, and hit down through the ball aggressively. If you allow your swing to get long, you will run the risk of drifting off of the ball and onto your right foot. When that happens, it will be nearly impossible to get back into position in time for a good strike. You might feel like you need to swing hard in order to get the ball out of a divot, so you may be tempted to go as far back as possible. Don't fall into that trap. Keep the backswing under control and make your focus nothing more than hitting the ball as cleanly as you can.
A normal hybrid swing probably isn't going to work for you when playing out of a divot. You will need to make some adjustments, and the three listed above are a good place to start. Of course, this might not be all that you need to do. Depending on the specifics of the lie, and the kind of shot you need to produce, there may be other changes that are required.
