Chipping and pitching from the rough, when you can’t make clean contact with the ball, can be a daunting proposition with the ball reacting unpredictably off the club face and once it lands on the green. This was a problem 8-handicapper Jess Ratcliffe has really grappled with recently, and so sought the assistance of short game guru and adidas brand ambassador Dan Grieve to help.
WATCH: Dan Grieve gives Jess Ratcliffe a lesson on chipping from the rough
“I’ve discovered that when I find myself in the rough I gravitate to playing a high, soft landing shot and I often catch the ball a little bit thin,” Jess explains. “I don't feel like I get the best connection and when I do get a good connection, it runs out past the flag, so I need a system to fall back on to get me out of trouble.”
Luckily for Jess, Dan has experience of helping golfers of every ability chip and pitch the ball close from different lies and much of skill required takes place before the swing has even started.
“So this is where the golf IQ comes in, what I call the golfing intelligence,” Dan says. “It really comes into its own when you're reading lies in the rough - the lie is dictating how you play this shot. The golden rule when you're in a rough is you don't hit the ball first. When the ball is nestled down you do need to come in a little bit steeper, but Jess wasn’t setting up correctly for the shot she was trying to play. She was setting up with the majority of her weight on her right side and almost tilting away from the ball. From this position she will likely release the club too much and that’s where the thin shot comes from.”
“So when the ball is sitting down, I'd be down the grip and sit down into my knees a little more with a wider stance, I’d be opening the club face a bit more and I’d set up squarely. I'm also leaning forward towards the target a little and I'm flaring that left foot out of the way. And just by the very nature of setting up with my chest bone now much further in front of the ball from this set-up with a bit of shaft lean, that's going to encourage me to set the club a bit earlier and be able to get into the back of the ball more easily.”
During the lesson, this very quickly allowed Jess to control how quickly the ball would come out of the rough. Naturally, most chip shots hit from the rough tend to come out with less spin and release a lot more. But what about when you don’t have much green to work with and need to ball to land softer?
“Now when you want to hit a higher, softer-landing shot from the rough we do need some release into this to soften it,” Dan reveals. “So we go even wider with the stance, use our highest lofted wedge and get the hands lower as I want the loft pointing up more. It’s more like a bunker shot - there's not much rotation of the of the upper body, it’s it's more of a hands and arms shot.”
Jess had some almost instant results during her lesson, hitting different types of short-game shots to order having made subtle changes to her technique to accommodate the lies she faced. One way to practice this is to throw the balls over your shoulder in a rough then look at each one and react to it. You then learn how the subtle differences in how you set your weight and how you attack the ball changes how the ball comes out.
A big thank you to Dan Grieve for giving us his time and to adidas for the opportunity. Dan was wearing the Ultimate365 8.5 inch shorts from adidas to improve his shorts game.
