Hi, this is Mel Sole from the Mel Sole Golf School and this is your February 2015 golf tip, and we are here in Central Mexico at Club de Golf Malinalco where I come every year for Christmas and New Year. As you can see, beautiful, beautiful day. It’s 78 degrees here every day, and la
Hi, this is Mel Sole from the Mel Sole Golf School and this is your February 2015 golf tip, and we are here in Central Mexico at Club de Golf Malinalco where I come every year for Christmas and New Year. As you can see, beautiful, beautiful day. It’s 78 degrees here every day, and last year at this time, I was in the same bunker and at that point there was not this beautiful white sand that we have now. They had old sand. It was like clay, very hard. I used that opportunity to talk about playing out of very hard bunkers, and what I mentioned was taking care of the bounce of the club. When the bunkers are very hard, you want a very shallow bounce and so I used my lob wedge which has 5 degrees of bounce.
This year the club has been slowly changing all the bunkers on the course to this beautiful white sand. They are doing 4 or 5 bunkers a year, and they very kindly did this bunker for me to teach out of. I thought I’d use this opportunity to talk about those of you that play out of very fluffy sand, and when you’re playing out of very fluffy sand, you’ve got to have exactly the opposite. You want lots of bounce because this sand is very soft and the club will tend to dig a little bit, and so you want a club with bounce. My sand wedge has 10 degrees of bounce. This sand is so nice and fluffy that if I play here on a regular basis, I’d most probably get a sand wedge with even more bounce than that.
I can add bounce to a 10 degree by opening the club face. If … I’m going to throw my lob wedge away because we don’t need it … You can see this angle here, this low end is lower than the front edge, and that’s what we call bounce. If I open the club face, I create even more bounce. At that point there, it’s 10 degrees. If I open the club face, I can get this to about 14-15 degrees, and that’s what I’m going to do here.
If I’m playing to a flag that’s fairly close, I can open the club face to create a little bit more bounce, and that will help me let the club slide through. If I wanted to go to a further flag, then I would keep the club face square. I would still have enough bounce that it wouldn’t dig and I’d get a little bit more distance.
With this, I am going to open the club face. Now when you open the club face, and I’ll notice this a lot with some of my students, you take your normal grip and then they turn their hands to open the club face. That’s not the way you want to do it. You want to run the club face and then take your grip. Because if you take your grip and then turn the club face, when you swing it’s going to come back this way again. Just remember, open your club face then take your grip. I’m still going to aim 2 inches behind the ball.
Now we can see that ball came out nice and high because I had the club face open, didn’t run very far. If you’re playing out of fluffy sand, make sure you have enough bounce for a successful sand shot.

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