Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

Now is a very simple action that we do at the start of every single hole of golf that we probably really don’t consider too much about and it’s that. Now we bang the ball in or bang the tee in, stick the ball ontop of it and off we go but a lot of golfers are actually setting themselves up with that motion right there. They’re setting themselves up to fail, simplying teeing the golf ball up at the wrong height could already give them a disadvantage. Now we probably do want to tee the ball up everytime be it a par three or a par four, par five. We want to tee the ball up but tee pegs come in all different shapes and sizes as do golf clubs and particular drivers all different depths.

So we need to make sure we’re marrying up the correct size tee with correct size driver to get the ball at the correct height as well. Now the standard tee I’ve got here is just a normal straight tee, push into the floor as far as you want but they are some sort of castle tees that we call them off, flange tees. Where down at the bottom it kind of sticks out a little, almost like a little skirt and that will stop the club going – sorry, stop the tee peg going into the ground too deep and it will set the tee at exactly the right height.

So if you’re not sure about teeing up the ball at the correct height maybe go and buy some castle tees, different colors denote the different heights and start using those to tee the ball up at the correct size and depth for you and the key thing we’re looking for really when we set up to the ball is we want to round about half of the ball visible at the crown of the club so if I slide that in there you can see about half of the club, sorry — half the ball above the top the club. If I had all of the ball above the top, that’s going to be too high — I’ll go underneath that, hit the top of the club, shoot it in the sky but if I had all of the ball level with the club at this height. Potentially that’s too low, it might encourage me to only hit the bottom of the fade — sorry, it might encourage me to even take a divot as I try to get the ball up in the air. So having the ball up at the correct size and height of tee there is the good first step to hopefully enabling you to hit better and straighter golf shots.