There’s a famous stat in aviation that most airline accidents happen during takeoff or landing. The same is true for golfers.
Amateur golfers are, put simply and bluntly, at their worst during their own takeoffs, which in golf terms, is getting in play safely off the tee. This was something reiterated by Arccos, who doubles as the official game tracker of the PGA Tour, underlined in its most recent Distance Insights reports.
A 10-to-15 handicap, for instance…
- Hits almost seven percent of drives into a penalty situation, like Out of Bounds or a water hazard.
- In addition, they hit nearly 16 percent of drives into recovery shot situations, like the trees or other punch out situations.
Here’s the full rundown from Arccos’s report.
As you can see, low handicaps are better, but not that much better. They’re still hitting 12 percent of drives into penalty or recovery situations, which is between one and two per round.
Botching your takeoffs by hitting drives out of play is the fastest way of making big numbers, and it’s why pros are so good at avoiding this mistake. They only hit a paltry 0.3 drives out of play per round, less than one every three rounds.
3 Things That Can Help
Yes, it’s true that a large part of the reason pros hit more good shots off the tee is because they have better swings than the rest of us. But their strategy is also way better, and there are three things the rest of us can learn from them—and employ in our own game.
1. Avoid the swing soft/swing hard mistake
A lot of amateurs tend to vary their swing speed as they go through a round, and get the worst of both worlds as a result. They swing far harder than they should on longer holes and make guidey, uncommitted golf swings on nervy tee-shots.
- Key Takeaway: Pros seem to swing at 95% on the majority of their drives.
2. Adjust your tee height
Even though pros seem mostly the same from shot-to-shot, they adjust different tee heights to create different shots. And yes, you’re good enough to do this—we even tested it!
- Key Takeaway: Lower tee heights keep the ball straighter but it goes shorter; higher tee heights send the ball longer, but spray more.
3. Manage bottlenecks
Most fairways narrow at some point, either because of hazards like water and out of bounds, or using non-penalty hazards like bunkers. Pros are good at knowing how to navigate them.
- Key Takeaway: If you can go over the bottleneck, you probably should (high tee shot). If you can’t, try to go around it by aiming away from the worse hazard (normal tee height). If it narrows to 40 yards or less, DECADE founder Scott Fawcett says that’s too narrow even for your low tee height shot, and you should probably drop back to a shorter club.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
