Round Wreckers: Hitting Off Hard Pan

Welcome to the Round Wreckers series! In this first episode we discuss hitting shots off hard surfaces and how to conquer them. Stay tuned for more content like this!

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Be it baked out Turf in the midsummer heat or a well traffic area turning good Turf into hard pan it’s in this situation I see players of all abilities challenged all hope is not lost however there is always the option to adapt your tactics which we will touch on and

Demonstrate but when the tactics are fixed and you have to make good contact be pitching or chipping from this hard pan L I’ll give you the adjustments to make to ensure it’s not a round wrecker for you certainly a round wrecker situation for most I’m sitting on a dirt cart path and

It’s recently rained and then summer Heat’s dried it all out so this is very hard packed in fact when I toss a golf ball down um not much dirt wants to uh come up in fact the ball wants to bounce a little bit and when I make a practice

Wing I feel really hard scratching the bottom of my Sur uh bottom surface of my club so clearly the option is always to adapt our tactics and if you do adapt your tactics I would suggest you have one club that is your go-to low launch running club when you’re this far off

The green so how far off the green am I I’m 20 yards away from the edge of the green and then the pin’s another seven or eight yards on the green it’s going to break to the left a little bit and it’s going to go up with the green and

Then move to the right off the shoulder uh what’s good from here if I’m tring to chip run 7 IR as I’ve got in my hand right here anywhere on the green is probably pretty good so I kind of pick out a spot mid distance maybe 8 to 10

Yards in front of me where I’m trying to land it then I basically play just a standard little Chip Shot feeling very tall often times I’ll get the toe of the club up in the air to ensure that not the entire sole of the club is going to

Touch the ground cuz uh what I don’t want to do is I don’t want to have the ground repel or bounce the club up into the bowl now the outcome if that does happen when I’m swinging slowly with a s iron well the result of that wouldn’t be all that

Impactful there’s the left brake and here it comes off the shoulder the green keep coming down keep coming down so I’d be somewhat satisfied with that and if this is a round recer for you I think you should also be satisfied with that I’ve got 10 12 ft from left to right

Coming down the slope to convert an up and down from this situation having said that it’s okay to change your tactics sometimes it’s absolutely necessary that we Loft it up if this grass wasn’t smooth it wasn’t Fairway and I couldn’t run it if I was forced to fly it then we

Need to understand what’s required to be proficient or successful with this shot that’s we’re getting on the green and there’s a chance that we’re getting it up and down and the most foundational principle here is that the ground’s trying to bounce the club up into the

Air and so you’re going to be number one very good at controlling the Precision with which you land the club in the exact location that you’re looking to land it so we can practice that just like we would in any other area of the game just by giving us ourselves

Something definitive to strike at whether we play this shot with a narrow stance or we play it with a wide stance I’m relatively impartial to I think both can be effective what isn’t effective is when you land the club too early what also isn’t effective so we need to land

The club precisely we know we know that what also isn’t effective is if you try and create a big depth to the ark as if you’re trying to make a divot what you want to do is you want to have a really really shallow or wide bottom Ark

Similar to um if I was just swinging the club straight back in my wrists and then straight through my wrist you can see that club stay really low to the ground when we do that we give the club less angle of descent if it has less angle of

Descent it’s less likely to bounce off the turf so a lower angle of attack here is better than a steeper angle of attack and in addition to that less intent to be into the ground is also beneficial as well so a couple of ways to play it we

Can go back in our stance route I would go pressure leaning to the left and then I would go wide to super wide i’ be trying to pass my arms way out to the Target it’s not going to be a high shot it’s going to be more of like a medium

Carry distance medium height maybe the edge of green so there it is so I got it up on the green didn’t create a whole lot of wrist hinge I kind of feel like the wrists are underloaded so versus hinging my thumbs where the club head would

Hinge close to my ear I keep it relatively wide there’s clearly some of it in there and then I really feel like I’m just passing it out there now what if we need more Loft and more spin than that then I go to a slight variation on that take technique Again

The Core Concepts of being really good at Landing Point Precision that’s required being really good at making sure the divot depth isn’t super deep because if it’s the deeper it is the more it’s going to want to bounce the club up into the bowl we got to be wide

But this time I’m going to go a little bit more outside and a little bit more hinge I’m going to stay really low post impact so the only variation is in swing Direction back swing a little bit more for cut wide stance pressure left and same follow through so there’s a little higher

Trajectory shot gets on the green doesn’t roll anywhere actually has a decent amount of spin on it and I see that harsh ground reaction on the bottom of the club and I felt it so as a last point to close the video out what if I

Tried to play it like most people try and play it regular pitch steep of attack that club bounces off the ground and I’m over in the long grass on the other side so the steeper I am into the ground and the more higher with the finish the more likely you are to make

The mistake that becomes the round wrecker so use the concepts we talked about and success will come your way my final thoughts around practice it takes some getting used to it’s not one shot aha you’ve got it practice it a lot allow yourself to make mistakes is those mistakes when understood are the

Doorways to success you can turn this shot into something other than a disaster possibly even making par but for sure it’ll no longer be a round rer