Pete Finch – PGA Teaching Pro

Ball position with wedges, now ball position with wedges is pretty much irrelevant unless you know the type of shot that you want to be playing. For example there is no set position where you want your wedges to be, because you want to play different trajectories, you want to impart different spins upon the ball. So there is no point in me saying that you should be playing your wedges out the center of your stance because, in fact, you should be deciding what ball position do you need for any given shot. For example, if I want to play a low skipping wedge which grabs on the green and stops after the second bounce, now I need loft to impart the backspin but I also need a steep angle of attack.

Now with a steep angle of attack the trajectory will be lower, the loft will interact with the ball and cause that late spin. So for this the ball position needs to be further back than center, so towards that back foot. That is going to increase that angle of attack down on to the ball, hitting the turf but with the loft it will have that spin. But there is no point pulling the ball position there if I want to hit a high floating shot over a bunker. That’s going to move my ball position much further forward, it’s going to cause me to open up that club face and then hit the ball nice and high.

Ball position with the wedges is purely based upon the situation in which you find yourself so the first thing that you need to do around this area of the game is decide on the shot that you want to play – is there a high floating shot over a bunker, is there a low skipping shot, is it a shot that you want to bounce once and check, is it one that you’re trying to draw, no matter what it is decide on the shot before picking your ball position and use what you’ve learned today about how ball position interacts with angle of attacking path and then hopefully you should be able to pick the right ball position for your wedge shots around the green and further out from the fairway.