If you’ve heard about the flop shot around the green and you want to learn how to play that or if you just need to have a shot in your bag that maybe goes a little bit higher incomes down a little bed steeper with a smaller amount of space, then this video here is going to help you – hopefully help you, teach you how to play that shot.
So, the first thing I would say when playing the shot is find your ball around the green and wherever the ball – check the lie of the ball, so if the ball is – say, there’s a bunch of grassy here, and then this ball is sitting way down in here, you can barely see it, there’s just a ton of grass and stuff around here, this type of shot is not going to be a candidate for a flop shot to be able to hit it. You needed to be up in the rough a little bit so that you can get the club underneath there and then pop it up. You need a little bit of space in there or you can also hit it from a fairway lie, like a really tight lie like this. So, that would be the first thing I would say, is just to check the lie of the ball in the grass or wherever it is to know whether or not it can do [0:01:39] hit that shot, so that is the first thing I would say.
Next is the wedge selection. So, typically, people will think of playing a flop shot with their highest lofted club. With the sterling irons, we have a 60° lob wedge, so most people will think like, oh, let me go to the lob wedge, that’s the club I’m going to hit it with, but that may not be the best wedge for the flop shot depending on the condition. So, if that’ll give you a couple of situations here – so if the ball is sitting down a little bit in the rough and you need to get into some grass here but you don’t want it to dig into the grass and get stuck in the grass, you needed to come through a little bed, then the sand wedges probably going to be a little bit better because there is a couple important parts to the wedge here, so this first part, as you come down the club face here to the pointy part, this is the leading edge where the digger, and then as you come around the bottom, there is a curvy part here called the bounce or the skipper. So, how those to come into play here with this type of shot is if you have the club square or have some shaft lean or something, then this leading edge can really dig into the ground, and then if you open the club face a little bit, then this bounce is exposed in this is going to keep the club from digging in a little bit. So, and the situation we have here where we want to hit a flop shot and we are in some thick rough here, and there are some grass and the way, you probably want to pick the sand wedge because with the sterling irons, the sand wedge is the one that has the most bounce on it; it has the most amount of this stuff on at, and that’s pretty well going to be the same with most wedges, also the same wages probably going to be one of the most bounce and you need Here because you’re probably going to want to open the club face here so that when you go down into the rough and get it, it doesn’t grab and just hold and slow down the club face before it gets to the ball. This bounce kind of keeps it from grabbing and lets you get through the rough with that open club face to be able to hit it, so that is a situation where you’d want to pick a sand wedge for a flop shot. A situation where you might want to take a lob wedge is more if you have that tight lie situation so if you have the type lie like this where there is not a lot of room there, then when you open the club face here, you want – let me back up and say this, rephrase this a little bit, from a tight lie, it takes a certain type of wedge grind so the grind means how this sole and bounce here is like literally grinded down, so in the case of our sand wedge and lob wedge here with our sterling irons, what we did was we gave this a zero bounce heel grind. So, when you open up the club face here, there is literally no bounce on this heel part, here is where you open it up, the club still will sit down and you can get under it, so when we’re talking about here, the tight lie flop shot, you need a wedge like in both of our sterling irons and our sterling irons sand wedge and sterling irons lob wedge have this zero bounce grind on the heel here. In other wedge manufacturers, a lot of them will have different grinds as well, so get one that has some of the bounce shave it off here on the heel, and so that will allow you when you open it, open the clubface, that’s the club set down a little bit so that you can add loft, so when you have the club normal here, it is like this much loft, and then when you open it, it gets more loft, but when you – with this as your bounce grind here, still going to sit down, so that when you are talking about a tight lie here, you can still hit a flop shot and get under it without that – now, if you didn’t have that zero bounce heel grind and that bounce was there, then the club would sit up more like this, and then the bounce would hit off the ground, and it would just raised to the club face here to hide to be able to get under it. So, without a certain type of wedge grind or design built into the club, a flop shot basically, I was going to say won’t work, probably won’t work with some clubs from a tight lie, so you need a certain type of wedge to be able to do that. So, with the sterling irons, you are all taken care of there with the sand wedge and the lob wedge so you can play that shot.
So, the next thing is, I mentioned that you want to open the club face to hit the flop shot because of this here, I have a sand wedge, haven’t been from 55 to 57, so you got 57° of loft there – oh, sorry, actually, this is the lob wedge, so this is 60, this one here, and so we have 60° of loft here, and if you wanted it higher, hit this flop shot, then you open the clubface, and it makes the loft go higher, so wherever the clubface is pointed at impact, this is an important thing to understand about golf, wherever the clubface is pointed at impact is primarily where the ball is going to start, so if you want to hit it higher, you have to open the clubface did it higher. However, what you have to keep in mind is the lie angle, so when you are hitting here like this and you are coming through, then if your club is upright, the clubface points flat, if it’s flat, the clubface goes to the right, so similarly, when you open the clubface, the… Let’s see, when I open the clubface here, oh, it points out to the right – sorry, I didn’t get my spacing right there, so when you open the clubface, the club actually points out to the right. See, you have to, on this shot, you have to either squat down a little bit or do something to basically lower, open the clubface, clubface points to the right there, and then you have to lower the handle by either lowering yourself or squatting down a little bit, so that clubface is pointed right at your target where you want it to go. So, mind where the face is pointed when you open the clubface, and the more you – and so, there it is square, and the more you open it up, though more points to the right, so you just kind of have to eyeball it and visualize where this face is pointing because you are not going to have this little stick on here when you are hitting this shot, so the more you open up, the more you have the lean of the shaft down to get it to be straight again and that can look a little funny, say where you are – how can I do this so that you can see it here? When you look down at the clubface here, it can look like it is square when you set up normally, and then when you open the clubface, it looks with all the groove lines here and the leading edge here, it looks like it’s pointing way out here so that can be a little bit confusing to your mind and brain at first when you first see this because then you are like, oh my gosh, I’m a right-hander here, and they opened up the clubface and it just looks like it’s going to go way right, but that is where you got to keep in mind that it doesn’t matter so much the leading edge or these score lines where it looks like in that regard where the clubface is pointing. It is more of this lie angle here, so open the clubface, and then lower yourself, lower the handle so that he gets to a point where it is straight, and then you just got to keep that in mind and just kind of eyeball it. There’s no other way to do it other than that, you just kind of see like, okay, it looks a little left here, it looks a little right here, okay, that looks about right, I got to squat down a little bit, maybe lean up a little bit – okay, right there, the face is open, it looks like it’s pointing to the right, but the actual important part, the clubface looks like it’s pointed to where I want to hit it, so now, I can swing, and so now, with the swing here, the tip I have here for you with that is to swing smooth and just swing smooth – swing smooth? And why that is important is because when you open the clubface here like this, so normally, you have this much clubface to deal with, when you open it, all of a sudden, there’s a lot less space to be able to hit the ball, so you have to be really, really precise with the strike when you are hitting this shot. So, it’s super, super important to hit these shots smoothly. You can take a long swing but just be super smooth, and I’ll go back to this – I’ll bring out this tetherball analogy again that I’ve used on the channel here. So, with a tetherball, the ball is coming around the same point in space every time, but if you put a little bit of tension in that swing, then the ball is going to disrupt the flow of that and it’s not going to come around the same point in space, so you got to be super smooth when you are swinging and not slow or not guiding or not deliberate, but just be smooth, and you can swing a little fast at it or make a longer swing with it, but just make sure that you are really, really smooth, and the generally, I would say to try and keep your head fairly still so it doesn’t have to be perfectly still, but if you are trying to hit a flop shot and you are going like this while you are swinging, it’s going to be really hard to get the position needed to get that strike consistently on the ball so just generally pretty stable, try not to move your head around too much until you once you hit the ball, then of course, you can move and come up out and up, but general head still, swing smooth, and that should hopefully be able to hopefully hit the flop shot better, so hit the flop shot, so those are the things I would say as far as hitting a flop shot.
To recap here, check the lie, make sure it’s a type of lie where you can hit a flop shot, and once you determine that it is, then pick out the right wedge for it, pick out either the sand wedge or the lob wedge, you could even hit a flop shot if you want with a gap wedge for a pitching wedge, or nine-iron or any other are your if it’s got the right design on it. Once you pick out the right wedge for their shot at hand, then open the clubface, and then when you open the clubface, the more you open it, the more you need to lower yourself, lower the handle so that that clubface is pointing – it doesn’t matter so much when you are setting up but as long as you are getting back to that point, I think it helps to set up there so that you know like, okay, this is where we are going to come back, not necessary but I think it helps. So, open the clubface, mind of the lie angle, keep your head pretty still and still swing really smooth with it because you got to be super, super precise with that strike and generally, I would say because of that, it is a high risk shot, so use it accordingly, I guess or use it with caution, so know that there is a chance that – it’s a high risk shot, so just be aware of that, and that don’t use it I guess unless you are willing to take the risk that comes with that, so that’s what I would say about hitting flop shots around the green, give those things a try and put them into practice, and hopefully, you will be hitting some amazing flop shots, moonballs around the green.