Trying to hit different shots with your driver is generally considered a fool’s errand—unless you’re one of the very best players on the planet, and even then it’s questionable.
But that doesn’t mean pros don’t do it. It’s just that when they do, they don’t try to hit shots left and right on command. They try to go higher and lower. And when they do they don’t try to do so intentionally. They make their same, stock swing, and simply change the height they tee up their ball.
It’s a strategy called High Tee-Low Tee, and it’s so simple that most golfers could (and should!) use it themselves.
Here’s how I use it as a scratch golfer…
High tee
The 2nd hole at my home club, Tamarack Country Club, has this nasty cross-bunker in the fairway. It’s too narrow to go around so you either have to go short or long.
From the back tees it’s about 265 yards to carry but once you get past it, the fairway bulges. Get over the first hurdle and you’ve got some good space to play with.
It’s what makes this hole a high tee situation for me.
My current gamer is a Titleist GTS3, 10 degrees turned down a little. And when I tee the ball slightly higher—so about 2/3rds of the ball is above the top of the driver—you catch the ball higher on the face, which launches the ball higher and lowers the spin.
More carry, more distance.
Here’s the drive and these are the numbers. The little higher launch got me safely over the bunkers. I gained about 0.3 Strokes Gained over scratches with this drive.
Low Tee
The thing about the high tee is that your misses also get slightly wider along the way. When you want to tighten it up to avoid trouble around the hole, that’s when it’s best to go for a low tee option.
The 6th hole at my home club Tamarack Country Club is when I go that route, but it’s an awkward hole for me. I like to hit draws but this is an uphill dogleg right with a reachable bunker left. It’s a driver situation because I can’t reach that long bunker, but here I use a low tee to focus on getting the ball in play because of the left bunker and out of bounds right.
When I go low tee I only want about a third of the ball above the top of my driver. Again, I don’t change my swing, but just by lowering that tee you lower the launch and increase the spin. Those two things make this shot more accurate.
Notice how both the launch is lower and the spin is higher. That’s what kept this ball in play.
Again, nothing much changes, just the tee height. Simply raising and lowering it can produce two vastly different types of shots, and knowing when to use both is one of the easiest strategy hacks in the game.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
