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Video Tip: How to Hit a Stinger

In this video tip, Scott Tanguay of the Coastal Golf Academy at Whispering Pines Golf Course in Myrtle Beach, S.C. shows us how to hit the shot that Tiger Woods made popular early in his career: the stinger.

Scott Tanguay:

Hey guys, Scott Tanguay here with the Coastal Golf Academy, right across the street from Myrtle Beach International Airport. Come by and see me!

So today we're going to talk about a little bit of a fancy shot, but it's also one that you'd like to have in your bag, in case there's trees or wind and whatnot. That shot is the stinger: cool-looking shot, nice and low, rides up a little bit and stays under the wind and hopefully stays down the middle, like you want.

So, the most obvious thing is to grab less loft. You don't want to try and do this with a nine iron or something. So you grab a five, a four, a three, something like that. So, that's step one. We already need less loft to start with. Step two would be if we go to the side here, typically, with like a long iron, you're playing it at least in the middle, maybe even a smidge forward, so that we get the same proper loft on it.

But if we're purposely hitting a stinger, it's going to ride a little bit further back. Maybe an inch or two inside the right foot. That's going to make sure that we come in with less loft and that it's going to come out a lot lower. So we’ve got less loft on the club, we put it back in our stance. Now another really important thing, I remember this from Tiger Woods, is if you're trying to purposely hit a high shot, you finish high. You kind of finish over the left shoulder. If you're trying to hit it low, we finish low. So, just because you put it back in your stance, you're not going to hit the stinger if you go for the full finish over the shoulder.

So when we hit it, we really want to finish, maybe shoulder height, hip height at the least. So we're here, we’ve got a three iron, we put the ball back a little bit. Now the last little tip is, you really don't want to give it a lot of acceleration at the bottom. If anything, you want to feel like you're a little bit easing into it. What the speed does is hit at higher. Like when you hear, “When it's breezy, swing easy.” So if we swing easier, it's going to flight out lower. The harder you swing, the higher it'll go.