Recovery

All right, let's talk about recovery shots here. So this is really the last skill to discuss. It is going to relate directly to compound errors, and this is really— you've hit a bad tee shot, you're in the trees, or you're some type of hazardous situation where you just need to get the ball back into play. So for the most part, I'm going to be speaking about this from the context of the trees because I think that's the most common. Obviously we're not gripping down and chipping a low 7-iron if we're in some like cabbage or like bushes or something like that. Then in that case you take as much loft as possible and try and hack your ball out to the fairway. But long story short, we want to be able to pitch the ball back into play so that in theory we can hit our next shot on the green. So the way that that will work out in a particular hole— boom, you hit a bad tee shot, it's gonna happen, you're in the trees, you You got to pitch out that way. Your third shot, in theory, you can hit that ball on the green right now. Is it possible that you missed the green? Absolutely it is. But just know, hey, if I've missed the green, let's say I get my next shot on the green and I two-putt. In that case, you made double bogey, right? Because you had a bad tee shot and you hit a bad approach shot. You hit a good recovery shot. Every other skill in your game did what it was supposed to do. You made double bogey because you hit two bad shots and they really punished you there. There. Um, conversely, let's say you hit your tee shot in play, you hit your approach shot on the green, you hit your lag putt and it was not inside 10%, it was well outside of that, you missed your second putt, you three-putt. In that case, you shoot one over because you had a terrible lag putt. Another case would be you hit your tee shot in play again, you miss the green on your approach shot, you chip up and on, and then you two-putt. Why'd you make bogey there? Well, you made bogey because you missed your approach, you missed the green on your approach shot. So hopefully that makes sense. The basic way you're hitting this knock, uh, pitch out shot, generally taking a 7-iron, gripping down on it, taking it in the middle back of your stance, and taking about a 7:30 swing on the way back. So just as a frame of reference here for a 7:30 swing. That's about a 730 swing. And so you want to map out for you how far that shot goes. For me, it's about 130 yards. So you want to know, hey, I'm able to keep this thing low. You don't want to take something like a 5-iron or a 4-iron because odds are you'll end up topping it. But you want to typically take about a 7-iron. If you need it to go a little bit shorter, you might take a little bit less loft. You might try to take a little bit of a shorter swing and potentially move the ball further back in your stance. This is a shot that you'll get better at over time, but this is a fundamental shot that you need to have once you're in the trees to be able to get back out into position.