When you find yourself short-sided to a tricky pin, you need to know how to hit a pitch shot that lands softly on the green.
Getty Images
Sometimes we get a little too aggressive with our approach shots from the fairway. Typically in this situation, the up-and-down for par is far from simple.
When you fire at a flag and miss, you’re typically going to find yourself severely short-sided. This means that you have very little green to work with between the fringe and the hole. It’s a tricky spot to be, as it makes your ensuing chip or pitch extremely delicate. Hit it too soft and you’ll miss the green. Hit it too hard and you’ve got 30 feet coming back for par.
This sort of dilemma is why you’ll always hear the pros talk about “missing on the correct side.” If you miss in a spot with plenty of green to work with, it becomes much easier to get up-and-down.
In a perfect world, you’d miss on the correct side every time you failed to hit the green. Unfortunately, you’ll never miss in the right spot every time. And when you do find yourself in these tricky situations, it’s important you have a shot you can reliably hit to give yourself a look at par with your next stroke.
GOLF Top 100 Teacher Tom Stickney shows us how to hit that high pitch in the video below.
How to hit a high pitch
One of the trickiest short-sided greenside shots comes when you’ve got a bunker between your ball and the hole. You’ve got to be able to loft the ball high and have it land softly in order to get it close to the pin. And if you leave it a little bit short, you’ll be looking at an even tougher shot from the greenside bunker.
Lots of players opt to just “take their medicine” and pitch it well past the hole. However, you don’t have to resign yourself to bogey in this situation. All you need to do is remember one simple key when you hit your pitch.
“When we make our swing, the biggest key it to keep moving,” Stickney says. “Keep the right shoulder moving through the shot.”
On such a short pitch, it’s easy to decelerate and stop moving your right shoulder through impact out of fear for hitting the ball long. But when you do this, you allow the hands to take over and you’ll be at risk of dumping it in the bunker or blading it over.
So next time you find yourself short-sided near the green, remember to keep that right shoulder moving. It’ll keep you from dumping it short of the green and makes sure you’ll have a look at par on your next shot.
