Picking The Right Ball And Teeing Off At The Correct Height

Nov 20
09:41

2009

Donald Saunders

Donald Saunders

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This article provides advice for novice golfers on selecting the correct golf ball and deciding upon the best height for that ball on the tee.

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The choice of golf balls that is available these days can be perplexing to say the least to the novice golfer and one thing which creates more mistakes than anything else when it comes to picking a golf ball is its compression rating. In most instances beginners think that a tightly wound ball with a high compression rating is going to give them the longest distance,Picking The Right Ball And Teeing Off At The Correct Height Articles however, this is not the case and indeed the opposite is often true.

When selecting a golf ball you have to look for a ball which has a rating that matches your swing and the general rule is that the slower your swing is the lower the rating should be. The reasoning behind this is fairly technical however, in simple terms and up to a point, the more that your club head flattens the ball during impact the farther it will travel and the amount of flattening attained is very largely dependent upon the power of your swing.

Golf ball manufacturers give a compression rating to their balls with softer balls being given a low score and harder balls a high score up to a maximum of 100. In just about all cases you will find that the longer hitting professionals will use a ball rated at the top end of the scale between 95 and 100 while most professional golfers opt for something a little below this figure in the range of 90 to 95. However, for the average golfer a rating of between 75 and 90 is probably the right choice with high handicap, soft swinging novices fairing best with a ball coming in between 60 and 75.

It may be a nice idea to believe that picking the same compression rating that Tiger Woods uses is going to yield the same results for you however this is not going to be the case and you will need a great deal of practice before you will get anything like the same performance.

Next, having selected the correct golf ball the next question you have to ask is how high should you tee the ball?

The simple answer is that you need to tee your ball so that when the head of your club is resting on the ground half of the ball is showing above it. Also, most importantly, having found the right height for your club you should always tee the ball at the same height.

Some golfers might tell you that you ought to vary the height of the ball according to the conditions of the course. For instance, if the fairway slopes downhill you ought to tee the ball low and if it slopes uphill you should tee the ball high. This is not correct and you should always tee your ball at the same height whatever the contour of the course.

Having said all of this, there is one exception to this rule and this applies if you are teeing off into a reasonably strong wind. Here you should always tee up your ball low and also hit it low to achieve the greatest distance and to control the direction of your ball.