Short Game Golf Club Selection (Video) - by Pete Styles
Short Game Golf Club Selection (Video) - by Pete Styles

I think one of the areas that can be so interesting for a golfer and particularly a coach trying to help a golfer, is using the right club in the short game. So let’s imagine we’re very close to the green now, we’ve got about 25 yards to the green, and let’s say there’s a bunker in front of us. We could use lots of different clubs to play the right shot, and a golfer will often get confused about which club to play. Now, if we take the bunker out of the way, that pretty much means we could use any club in the entire bag, maybe the driver is not going to be the best option but you could chip the ball with 3-wood, hybrid club, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine-iron, on any weight that you carry and you might be carrying three or even four wedges.

So some golfers get confused from this distance, they say to me, Pete, just give me one club and I just want to chip with one club all the time, I want to be able to hit the same shot every time and it goes the same height and rolls the same distance. But that’s just not really the feature of the short game. The feature of the short game, the idea I like is the creativity of the short game, that we can hit lots of different shots with lots of different clubs that all go the same distance, there’s no hard and fast, right or wrong way to play this. I think probably my favorite tip in terms of trying to choose the right shot is to actually pick the golf ball up in your hand or imagine you’re picking the golf ball up in your hand should I say. And actually work out how far you would throw it and how high you would throw it for any given shot. So you might look at the shot here, I’m just going to play to that ball down there on the floor and I might be able to throw the ball really high and try and land it down there, or I might try and roll it across the floor and roll it much lower. Now in front of me here this is a fairly long grass, so this technique might not work here, but I could roll it down there, and there you see the ball gets strung up and caught in the long grass. So in that instance, I would now consider the higher floatier lob wedge or sand wedge shot to play that distance. Now, this long grass wasn’t here if it was all cut to the same length as the tee that I’m, I’d probably play that shot lower and rolling it in, maybe even play that with a 6-iron. So I’ve got a 6-iron or a lob wedge from the same distance out to the same target just depending on what’s in front of me. So clearly, your club selection is not always black and white, right or wrong when you’ve got these short shots, but use the idea of throwing the ball onto the green, work on your creativity to decide which club is going to be best for you when you’re playing a short game shots around the green. 2016-08-24

I think one of the areas that can be so interesting for a golfer and particularly a coach trying to help a golfer, is using the right club in the short game. So let’s imagine we’re very close to the green now, we’ve got about 25 yards to the green, and let’s say there’s a bunker in front of us. We could use lots of different clubs to play the right shot, and a golfer will often get confused about which club to play. Now, if we take the bunker out of the way, that pretty much means we could use any club in the entire bag, maybe the driver is not going to be the best option but you could chip the ball with 3-wood, hybrid club, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine-iron, on any weight that you carry and you might be carrying three or even four wedges.

So some golfers get confused from this distance, they say to me, Pete, just give me one club and I just want to chip with one club all the time, I want to be able to hit the same shot every time and it goes the same height and rolls the same distance. But that’s just not really the feature of the short game. The feature of the short game, the idea I like is the creativity of the short game, that we can hit lots of different shots with lots of different clubs that all go the same distance, there’s no hard and fast, right or wrong way to play this.

I think probably my favorite tip in terms of trying to choose the right shot is to actually pick the golf ball up in your hand or imagine you’re picking the golf ball up in your hand should I say. And actually work out how far you would throw it and how high you would throw it for any given shot. So you might look at the shot here, I’m just going to play to that ball down there on the floor and I might be able to throw the ball really high and try and land it down there, or I might try and roll it across the floor and roll it much lower. Now in front of me here this is a fairly long grass, so this technique might not work here, but I could roll it down there, and there you see the ball gets strung up and caught in the long grass. So in that instance, I would now consider the higher floatier lob wedge or sand wedge shot to play that distance.

Now, this long grass wasn’t here if it was all cut to the same length as the tee that I’m, I’d probably play that shot lower and rolling it in, maybe even play that with a 6-iron. So I’ve got a 6-iron or a lob wedge from the same distance out to the same target just depending on what’s in front of me. So clearly, your club selection is not always black and white, right or wrong when you’ve got these short shots, but use the idea of throwing the ball onto the green, work on your creativity to decide which club is going to be best for you when you’re playing a short game shots around the green.