Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Here we are going to look at the correct setup to have and the swing when playing from the greenside rough. This is one of the tougher shots to play in golf at times and you can see, how difficult the shot is with how much the tall players work on this and want to avoid being in this situation. So first of all, evaluate your lie, when you are in that greenside rough, look at what's happened to the ball, is it sitting up on top of the grass or has it nestled down and buried itself a little bit in the grass. Because we are going to have a different approach depending on what the lie is like. Let's consider the ball sitting up on top of the grass initially. So that’s going to look like a nice lie to you, the ball is high, it’s up on the grass. But the biggest thing here is make sure you don’t allow the club to ground, don’t let the club sit down in the grass next to it.

If you do this, the chances are that it’s going to move the grass and the ball is going to get moved and you are going to incur a shot penalty for moving the ball from its position. So make sure, when you address the ball, hover the club above the grass, keep the club as high as where the ball is. Don’t allow the club to ground on to the surface below. Okay, because the ball is a little bit higher than you are going to be standing, we are going to hold down on the handle of the club. This will shorten the length between the club head and your shoulders and it will help you pull the club head up away from the actual ground. It will help you keep the club head up at the level that the ball is at, on top of this tall, high, thick grass. Okay, next, we are going to set the hands just slightly ahead and we are going to play the ball from the middle. And we are going to keep the weight quite even here, what you want to do is to create a sweeping action with the club head, so the club head doesn’t really rise too high off the ground, it just gently shallowly comes back to the ball and clips the ball off the top of the ground.

But if the balls nestle down, we need a completely different approach, we really need to get a downward strike, to help get the club down to the back of the ball and to the bottom of the ball. So for this, we are going to set up slightly differently, we are going to have the club next to the ball, we are going to hold a little bit higher up on the club. So we have got the full length from the arm and the shaft of the club head is touching the floor and we are going to lean more on the left side here. That’s going to allow you to pick the club head up a little bit more steeply, so looking from this angle, if we set the weight quite even, we will make a sweeping action, where the club head stays relatively low to you away from the ball.

But if we set the hands forward of the ball and the weight onto the left side, that’s going to allow us to hinge the wrists more to pit the club head up and will make more of a dropping down action as we come back into the ball. I would give you one more tip on playing this shot, take a practice swing in the rough beforehand, setting the way on the left, the hands forward, picking the club head up and then dropping the club head back down to feel the resistance of the grass. That will help you know the force you need to play the shot with, to help you get the ball out of the rough. But if you follow those tips, you should find that you have got a better strategy for approaching that greenside rough and that you have popped the ball out, getting it to land quite softly on the green and hold on to the green.