I don’t know how many times I have chatted with my students during a lesson or with other golfers after a round and heard “I hit the ball so well but my score was no lower”.  More often then not the reason is because they missed a few greens and because of poor golf chipping, they weren’t able to save strokes and lower their score.  If you have had some great rounds ruined like this, it can be very frustrating.  I have had some really great rounds that were ruined because of a few late bogeys caused by missed greens in regulation and bad golf chips.

Hitting a bad golf chip and not getting the ball close enough to the hole can be caused by a few things.  Poor contact, wrong club selection and bad distance control are the main reasons for bad chips. I have a great way to get better at all three things in just a few practice sessions.

To stop poor golf chipping all you have to do is minimize the amount of loft on the club that you use.  Too many times I see golfers grab and pitching wedge or sand wedge to hit this shot with.  There may be instances where they’re some obstacles in between your ball and the hole like a bunker or hill and you have no choice but to use a highly lofted club like the sand and pitching wedges.

If you start to use a club that has less loft, then a shorter swing is needed to get the ball to the hole.  This makes it easier to hit the ball more solid as a lot less can go wrong if your swing is shorter.  What also happens when we use a less lofted club is that the ball will fly a shorter distance in the air and run more on the ground.  So in reality you may have a 20 yard shot but you will only really need to hit the ball 8 yards or so with a 7 iron and let the ball run the rest of the way to the hole.  If you had the same shot and used a sand wedge you would need to fly the ball almost all the way to hole (say about 15 yards) and by doing so you are creating a much bigger swing where more problems can occur.

Some golfers will try to take loft off of their sand wedge during a chip shot by playing the ball off their back foot and pressing their hands ahead of the ball to decrease the loft on their sand wedges.  This method is affective for some but I don’t suggest doing it.  Why?  Because this method promotes hitting the ball with a very upright swing and what can happen is a lot of  skulled, topped or fat shots because of the upright swing.  I call this the choppy swing!

So if you have no obstacles in your way, minimize the club you chip with which will shorten the length of your swing and the distance the ball needs to fly making much easy for you to execute the shot!  Get out to that practice green and start working on hitting shots around the green with your 6,7,8 and 9 iron more and lower scores will follow!

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