Elevated Tees

It is not unusual for a course to have a par-3 hole where the tee is elevated above the green. This throws a wrinkle into your club selection, and that’s not all. The way you play the shot needs to change, too.

A golf ball in flight obviously has a vertical component of motion and a horizontal one. When the ball descends, it is going down, but still forward as well.

A green that is lower than the tee allows the ball to fall down farther, which at the same time will also carry it farther forward. That means you need less club for a given distance. A general rule is to use one less club for every 50 feet of elevation difference.

If the tee is on a level with A’, B’, and the green at A, B, you can see that a club which would leave you short on level ground will be just right once it has completed its extra fall downward.

It’s hard to describe 50 vertical feet looks like, and hard to tell just by looking because the difference is stretched out over the length of the hole. Use one less club as a rule the first time you play the hole, then adjust from there.

The other danger that an elevated tee presents is that the ball spends more time in the air before it hits the ground. Every aspect of its flight gets exaggerated. We’ve dealt with forward-back motion with club selection, but there’s side-to-side motion as well.

Your fade that lands nicely on the green could fade itself right off the green by the time it hits the ground when launched from an elevated tee. It makes sense, then, to keep the ball as low as possible with this shot. This is especially true if there is any wind blowing.

Dip into Better Recreational Golf downloadable free on this blog, and look up the Hard Chip. This is the shot to play.

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