Adjusting Your Game to the Season

November 29, 2007
By: Butch Bundy

We are pretty lucky to live in a place where we can play golf year round. With that said, we still get enough of a change in the weather that there are some things that we need to keep in mind as we play in the winter. It can range from club selection to shots around the green. The biggest thing you need to remember is when we get in to the cool days that the golf ball won’t go any where near as far as it normally does during the summer months. I won’t bore you with a lot of technical nonsense, but the golf ball just isn’t able to be compressed as well when the air is cool. This causes the golf ball to not stay in the air nearly as long as it does during the summer months. In short, you need to make yourself hit an extra club in most cases and sometimes you need to hit two extra clubs. For example I normally hit my 8-iron 150 yards. Right now I hit a 7 iron from that distance and just accept that the ball won’t fly as far as normal. It can truly mess with your golf swing and your mind set if you walk up to your ball pull out your normal club, hit the shot as well as you can only to come up short and panic that you are somehow all of the sudden losing a bunch of distance. This will cause you to try and hit it harder and harder. Before you know it, you have messed up the tempo of your golf swing and then you begin to have more non-solid contact.
Not only does the ball not fly as far, but this time of year the greens and fairways will tend to be wet due to the golf courses putting out their winter grass. Golf course superintendents have had to put a lot of water on the playing surfaces to get the grass to come in properly. Not only does the ball not fly as far, but any bounce or firmness that we depend on when selecting our clubs is gone. Keep this in mind also when hitting the short shots around the greens and play for the ball to hit a bit softer. This all sounds fairly obvious, but there are a lot of people who don’t take this into account when playing this time of year.