Pitching. You know how to do that, right?

Today, I realized that I actually had no clue how to pitch the ball.

I understand chips, bump-and-runs, bunker shots, and pitches greater than 30 yards, but it dawned on me that I didn’t have a solid understanding of what I need to be feeling in the short pitch shots.  If you don’t know what you are supposed to feel in golf you can get pretty lost on the course, or at least that is my experience.  I’ve found that before I can really start to hit any specific shot well I have to have an internal model of what I need the swing to feel like and I have one for a large variety of shots, but I just haven’t found my short pitch shot yet.

While practicing, I try a number of different things and some have better results than others, but I don’t have my go-to swing feeling picked out yet.  So, in a way, I don’t yet know how to pitch that ball.  Don’t get me wrong, I can get the ball on the green and usually within a one-putt distance from the hole, but it’s more of a “winging it” kind of stroke and far from solidly repeatable.  There is a lot of creativity when it comes to the short game in golf and you can’t have one single robotic swing for any distance, but I think that you need to build on a solid fundamental shot that you comprehend on a muscular level before you can really branch out and let the creativity flow on the course.

I’ve worked on this distance for a long time (Roughly 5-30 yards from the green), so it was a bit frustrating today to realize that I still don’t quite understand the mechanics for the shot.  But, this is exactly why I’m practicing and putting in the hours, to have realizations like this and then go out there and figure it out.  It could be something simple that clicks tomorrow and then I have a pitch in my memory banks, or it could take a year to really sink in.  Regardless, without knowing (and admitting to yourself) what you don’t know you’ll never know how to get better.  I’ve pitched the ball for countless hours, but I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t fully understood exactly what I need to be doing quite yet.

This next week is dedicated to you, Mr. Pitch Shot.

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