Course management is a massively underrated facet of most golfers’ games unless you’re a tall player playing in the highest level. You probably don’t allow enough time and mental preparation and focus on your course management and how much of an affect that can have on your game. But course management becomes particularly important when you have a fault in your game you’re trying to manage. So let’s suggest we’ve got this pulled shot. Now ideally you’ve taken a load of lessons, you’ve sorted that pullout in the driving range and you’ve got better but that’s not always the case.

It might be that you’ve discovered the pulled shot on the first tee and you’re going into a competition and now you can’t really correct the pull during the round, you got to play with it, you got to manage it. So if you know on the first tee that you have a tendency to come over the top of the ball and drag it down the left hand side, how can you get a ball around the course making sure that the pulled shot does not punish you too much? Well the first thing is use smart course management to assess where the danger is, where the risk is.

Obviously when we’re playing the ball, we like the ball to go on the green but if it’s not going to go on the green if it’s going to go left, what is left, what’s dangerous? No, long grass, that’s not great but it’s not a penalty. Bunkers, not great, not a penalty. Out of bounds, water hazard, they are your penalty. They are the things we need to start avoiding and aiming away from. So I’m not advocating aiming too far to the other side to just sort of negate this completely but actually if on the right hand side there’s a bunker and on the left hand side there’s a pond, the bunker is safer.

So it might be better that in your set up position you start to point yourself to the right side, to the safer side and make a really good committed swing and try and get the ball into the bunker. If the pull that’s in your swing happens you might actually find the pull helped you out and you pulled the ball onto the putting surface and you’re safe. You should find that you don’t have that big a pull in your game; you’re not going to pull it into the pond on the left hand side. And if worst case scenario you hit the ball dead straight it’s going to end up in the bunker but at least from a bunker you can still carry on playing. You’re not taking penalty shots like you would be in the pond.

The other consideration with the course management of a pulled shot is actually just take a bigger club and just swing a little bit more smoothly. If you take a bigger club and swing smoothly you won’t find that you’re leaning back so much in your backswing. So if I’ve got a normal set of 7 iron for 150 and I take a 6 iron instead I might just feel I can stay a little bit more centered, drive forward and connect and that should stop the ball leaking too far to the left hand side. But if I swing overly aggressively, let’s I take an 8 instead of 7, I have to make a real big backswing to give it some. I’m leaning back too much, I drag across myself and I pull it left because I have the wrong golf club. My backswing was too long. So use good course management and good club selection to negate the fact that you can get around the course with a pull.