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    2 Most Common Causes Of Penalty Strokes

    Aside from knocking your ball into a hazard or out-of-bounds area, the two ways most commonly found to pile up the penalty strokes are from lost balls and unplayable lies.

    When you hit the ball in a wooded area on the side of the fairway, and the location is not considered to be out-of-bounds, you can dig around and try your best to find the ball. In doing so, one of the following three things is bound to happen:

    1. You may find the ball and then attempt to hit it onto the fairway.

    2. The ball might be located in an unplayable lie, which means that there is no chance to make a shot. You're only two options are to pick up the ball and move over by two club lengths or hit the ball again from where you originally took your last shot. Either way, you pick up a one-stroke penalty.

    3. The ball may not be easy enough to find, and can be declared lost. This means that you have to go back to the area where you hit your last shot, shoot over, and take a penalty stroke.

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    • « Choosing The Right Club & Reaching Realistic Goals For Pitching | Home | How To Handle Impossible Steep Bunker Shots »

    How To Handle The Swallowed Ball In The Bunker

    By Foursome | September 18, 2008

    If bunker shots weren’t tough enough to rescue yourself from during a challenging round of golf, worse yet is when the ball lands in a bunker and is practically buried whole by the soft sand. This type of scenario happens all of the time and is quite tricky to deal with when you only have the top surface of the ball showing itself, otherwise known as the “swallowed ball”.

    A Word Of Attitude

    Before we move on with advice on how to deal with the swallowed ball scenario, I want to quickly remind you not to get frustrated and upset when these types of shots happen. Remember that golf is supposed to be challenging. Golf is supposed to be unpredictable. Golf’s beauty is that the game always throws you a surprise or two (or three, or four, or…) so have fun with it! Don’t get caught up with a bad attitude. This will only make your game worse.

    Dig Your Stance Deeper Than Usual

    When the sand has swallowed your ball and you can only see the top surface, you are going to have to adjust the standard stance you use. Remember that the ball is literally resting a couple of inches underneath the sand so you must start from a lower level.Your goal is still to cause the clubhead to hit below the ball, as in any standard bunker shot, but since it is lower than usual, you have to adjust the same distance into the sand. Perhaps the ball is only down a couple of inches in the sand but those two inches make it harder than you think, so dig in and get ready to swing!

    Lower The Club

    Another tip is to get the club lower so that you can send the leading edge of the blade to dig in more. Simply close the clubface up slightly during address, while at the same time delofting it so that the club will more easily dig up.

    Give Your Swing More Speed

    When you play a buried lie like this, the club must ram through added inches of sand, splashing with more resistance. This obviously slows down the club to a large degree and calls for extra speed on the swing. I’m not talking about making the swing harder, just faster.

    Topics: Sand Bunkers, Tips & Practice |

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