Scott Tanguay from the Coastal Golf Academy at Whispering Pines Golf Course in Myrtle Beach, S.C. is here to show you a simple chipping tip that will help your game.
Scott Tanquay:
Hey folks, Scott Tanquay here at the Coastal Golf Academy here at Whispering Pines Golf Course directly across the street from Myrtle Beach International Airport. We're still out here on the par-five 3rd hole. We're a little short of the green.
Now when you're doing your short game, probably the thing I see people mess up the most is actually picking a spot they want the ball to land on. You can't just look at the hole, keep looking at the hole and try to guess how much to swing it. You’ve got to literally pick a specific spot. If there was a basket on the ground or a towel or something that you want to hit it on top of. Trust me, you'll do much better staring at your landing spot, giving a couple looks at the hole of course, but more so getting caught up in your landing spot, not necessarily the hole itself because, trust me, the closer you can hit it to your landing spot, the better the shot will be.
So we've got a little tough up-and-in here and not much green to work with. Probably maybe a 30-, 35-yard shot, and the pin's probably about five yards on. So we have two options in my opinion. We could hit it low. You could take your gap wedge, take your pitching wedge maybe, and try and pick out a spot in the rough there maybe three to five yards short and let it trundle on. Or, we could maybe open the face up a little bit and try and pop it up and land it just short of the flag so it'll spin. But the key is, you have to make that decision. You can't just kind of decide over the ball. So we'll do both.
We'll do the low chip-and-run first. Here, I'm picking a spot that I see where the sun kind of comes out of the shadow, we do a couple of little practice swings and try and mimic that, and then try and stare at that landing spot and let it go. So we're here, see my landing spot. And it hits right into the hill there and that is pretty good. We’ve probably got five feet there.
All right, so we do another. Now I’ve got to pick a different spot because now I'm trying to go hit the higher shot and have it roll out less. It's really whatever you're more comfortable with. You'd like to be able to do both, but whatever feels more comfortable in that situation. So let's say I don't want to do the low one, I feel like I have better chance of getting in close with the high one. Now we’ve got to pick a different spot. We're going to try and get it right on the front edge of the green and try to swing accordingly. So maybe open up the club a little bit, that helps to get us a little bit more loft, a little bit more of the bounce. Try and stare down your spot. So I’ve got my spot, and I just try and swing and get the ball to that spot.