Golf Clubs: Sand Wedges

Series Summary

Though Musselburgh, Scotland is home to The Old Links, oldest golf course in the world, golf is rumored to have begun in the Netherlands in 1297. After seven hundred years it still follows the same basic premise: hit a ball into a hole using a stick; the person who gets it in the least number of hits, wins. Today, a golfer may have any number of sticks, called clubs, made up of wood, graphite, or titanium. Each club has a specific use depending on the type, whether it’s the driver for an opening long ball, the wedge for shots out of the sand trap, the putter for the last short shot into the hole, or a variety of irons for anything in between. There are many aspects to the game of golf but the swing is obviously the most important of all of them. In this free video clip series this golfing expert, Hill Marks, is here to show you some great ways to improve your swing quickly so that the next time you hit the links you'll be shooting scores you only dreamed of. So watch these free videos and we'll see you out on the greens!

Video Transcript

"OK, now let's say you want to get to the green, we've got the sand wedge here, it's highly lofted and you want to fade the ball in. And what the fade means is you're going to hit the ball where it starts out left and it moves to the right. So some people slice the ball that would be considered an extreme fade. But what we want to do in this case is this is a easier way to control the ball because if you hit the ball straight, let's say the pin is on the right side of the green and you hit a full sand wedge straight it could maybe hit the green and go through the green or it could be off-line and could put you in some type of trouble. But this way you fade the ball and it will kind of track toward the pin and it's a way of guiding it so it may not be the perfect result but it leaves you, you avoid a lot of trouble. So the game of golf a lot of times is avoiding trouble, not always doing anything super great. So with the fade, what you do with the fade is you open the clubface. So when you hit the ball straight, the clubface is lined up perpendicular with your target. Here you're going to open the clubface so it's going to be like that but to compensate for this then you're going to aim to the left of the target a little bit. So generally you're going to lose about a clubs distance so if you hit your full sand wedge eighty yards you don't want to fade the ball from that distance you'll use another club. But so you'll use, you'll lose a little bit of distance when you fade it. So you just aim to the left of the target and then you'll open the clubface relative to your stance. And that will keep the ball right the way, it will fade it right in on the target. And your margin for error is now in your favor."