I have 152 yards and a pretty tall tree standing right in my line to the pin. What do I do here? How do I hit that high shot? In this video, I’m going to show you my keys to hitting that high shot and turning this into a birdie opportunity. So, I have a separate video on how to hit the stinger or the low shot. But what about the high shot? You might find yourself in this situation pretty often on the golf course where you don’t quite know if you can get it high enough quick enough to clear the tree in front of you. So, if I was a little bit closer to that tree and I knew I couldn’t get it over, I’m just going to hit a punch shot. You can check out my video on how to hit that shot. Uh, I’ll leave it in the description. But, in this scenario, it is going to be short enough, this tree right here, to get this ball launched up in the air and onto the green hopefully. Now, there are a few keys to playing this shot. And the first one is going to be club choice. So, the number one priority when you’re trying to hit a high shot over a tree like this is to make sure that you clear it. It seems obvious, but most golfers are not going to do a very good job of this. So, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you have enough loft on your club that you choose to get it over. So, in this scenario, I think I said the yardage beginning of the video was like 150, somewhere around that. And normally I would hit a pitching wedge that distance, but I’m not super confident that I can launch a pitching wedge high enough to clear this tree. So instead, I have my 52° gap wedge, which I know for a fact is going to come up a little bit short of this pin. But I’m okay with that because short of the green, no trouble at all. I might even be able to sneak this on the front edge. So that is key number one. You’ve got to choose enough loft to get it over that tree because the worst thing that you can do is get a little bit greedy, hit the tree, and have to hit a punch shot under that same tree. Now, if you compare this to the uh punch shot or the stinger shot that I have videos on where we’re putting the ball kind of back in our stance and narrowing our stance and choking uh up a little bit and then keeping that low finish, it’s the exact opposite with these higher shots. We want to get a little bit wider stance. Get that ball a little bit further up in the stance. And we’re focusing on staying in the shot the whole time. We don’t want to rip out of it like that cuz um that ball is going to be way forward. We need to keep that club kind of traveling downward as long as we can so that we don’t, you know, pop up and top it. So, we want a wide stance, ball up in the stance, and then we’re going to stay in the shot and really focus on a high finish. So, like swinging the club all the way in the air like that. And you’re going to have to practice this quite a bit in order to pull this shot off. But those are the keys. I’m going to go ahead and jump in here. See if I can get this on the green somehow. And the key here is I’m going to swing pretty much as hard as I can with that high finish cuz I know I don’t have enough club. So, just one of many scenarios, but that’s what we’re going to try to do here. So, let’s see if we can get it on. So, we’re going to line up ball a little bit forward. Nice and wide stance. Get comfortable. Visualize that going over the tree. That should be your last thought is seeing that ball fly over the tree. And then from here, just take a good swing at it with a high finish. And we cleared that tree by about 5 yards. So, plenty of clearance. The ball came up about 5 yards short of the green. But now I just have a simple little chip shot that I think I can get up and down. If this video helped you out, be sure to subscribe to the channel, give it a thumbs up, and check out my full shot type series. I’ve got a link to that in the description, a glossery on my site of all the different shot types and how to hit them. So check that out. Until next time, we’ll see you later.
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