In this short video lesson, I’m going to help you select the right club when you are chipping. The shot I have in the video requires a long roll going up over a couple of hills to get to a pin. Many of you may automatically default to pulling out your highest lofted wedge. But that may not be the best strategy for you. I want you to do is start looking at the entire shot as a whole first, before automatically picking your golf club.
If you automatically pick the same club, you’re going to get the same kind of shots and it may not be the best club for the shot.
To hit the shot in the video I’ve got three different options:
- high lofted wedge; or
- medium lofted iron;
or hybrid , something that you may not have tried yet.
Looking at my high lofted club, if I don’t hit it hard enough, and I’ve got the hill to carry, and a fair distance to go, it’s possible, I might hit it short, and then the hill is going to send the ball back to me, and I’m going to take a couple of putts to get up to the hole. A better option might be to hit a seven or eight iron, something that will allow me to roll the golf ball all the way up the hill.
So with my eight iron, I can take more of a putting stroke and it allows me to roll up the hill all the way out to the to the hole.
Now as I start to look at some different options, and maybe putter isn’t the right choice, because we have a sprinkler head in front of us or the surface of the grass is a little too bumpy, you can always pull out a hybrid.
If you do the same motion as a putting stroke with the hybrid by gripping down closer to the shaft and standing a little bit closer than you would normally. For a full hybrid, you can move this club like a putter and get a nice little bump to carry up the hill and go all the way to the pin.
So, you get the picture. Before you start automatically pulling out your wedge, I want you to look at what the shot demands of you. Does it demand something that rolls or does it demand something that needs to go up high and spin a lot?
Once you have that answer, you are going to be better able to select the club that’s best for the situation. The name of the game when it comes to chipping is to get it close so that you can make that up and down.
