Hi I'm Tom Stickney Golf Magazine Top 100 Instructor and today were going to talk about experimentation out of the rough. You know all too often people come up to me they say Tom Well I played this golf course the other day and the rough was really high and I didn't know what to do and the 1st thing I ask them is that have you ever practiced on the rough and they look at me like I'm crazy. Well if your golf course has the same amount of rough and you could see this rough here is very very benign mown down you're going to get a certain type of lie that ball is going to be perched up or maybe sitting just a little bit down but you're going to pretty much be able to get any club on it.

If you go to the back of your practice facility if you go to the side of your practice facility you're liable to see lies that where there's a lot of grass you will see lies where there's some hard pan you're liable to see laws where the balls perched up and you're maybe you'll see lies which have half up half down. How do I know where my sand wedge works in bad pan medium pan hard pan I don't unless I practice. How do I know what iron I can dig out of the rough in those 3 conditions if I don't practice I don't know how do I know when I can hit a hybrid out of the rough versus when I have to drop down to hit an iron I don't know. The whole key is you need to practice in the rough so you can figure out where that line of demarcation is so you can figure out that you know what I want to hit this hybrid out of this rough what the lie is not good enough I need to hit my 6 iron my 7 iron or what have you how do you know when you can't if you're 7 iron when you need to sand wedge and chop it out in the fairway if you don't practice out of varying degrees of rough you're not going to know to take the time to go work on it.