To take advantage of the technology in your driver, especially if you don’t swing it over 100 miles per hour, you might have been told it’s best to tee the ball high and catch it on the upswing. Do that, and you’ll maximize the time the ball stays in the air and minimize the amount of distance-robbing backspin.
That’s good advice, but perhaps more important to getting the most out of your driver is to make sure you strike the ball in the center of the face. If you’ve been hitting the ball high on the face more often than not, it’s probably the result of having a steeper downswing. Your club might be descending as it reaches the ball or even be level with the turf. What you want is to see the tee mark on your driver lower than the mid-point and, ideally, an imprint of the ball’s dimples near the dead center of the face (below).
If you keep seeing ball and tee marks higher on your face than needed to get a center strike, it’s time to tee the ball lower. How low depends on where you seem to be making the best contact, but you can see in the photo of me at the top of this article if only a small portion of the ball is above the face. Go to the range and experiment with tee height or, even better, get on a launch monitor to find out which height yields your best data.
Jason Guss, Golf Digest Best in State Teacher, Naperville (Ill.) Country Club.
HOT LIST INSTRUCTION: Tee It High? | Need More Speed? | Fairway Off the Tee | Hybrid vs. Wood | Irons Too Low? | Missing Greens? | Deaden the Strike | Help in the Sand
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com