Winter tips

We’re fortunate at Brocton Hall to remain on proper greens throughout the winter and with the addition of new permanent winter tee locations, the course will play roughly as long as the summer, given the diminished ball roll. We call it ‘normal golf played in the Winter’, rather than ‘Winter Golf’!

There are a few tweaks to your style of play that you’d be well advised to make to play your best over the coming weeks:

• Wear more thin layers instead of bulky layers and keep your hands and torso warm with mittens and a gilet.
• Use higher hitting clubs when it’s damp or you’re in the rough - reach for the hybrid instead of a 5 iron.
• Don’t open the club face in the sand (In fact I’d suggest never doing this!)
• Remember the old saying which is still true - “Swing easy when it’s breezy’
• Hitting fairways is golden as you can place the ball on the short grass.
• Play more 3/4 wedge shots instead of full wedges, you’ll get much more consistent results.
• Use a lower spinning ball, higher flying ball, the Mizuno JPX blue is on sale at only £19 a dozen and is great for many golfers.

There’s much more you can do but when it comes to your putts, you have a choice based on personal preference. I like to get my putts to drop into the hole on their last couple of rolls, so in the winter I have to accept that I’ll have a few short putts that will hit foot prints and miss. A different approach would be to be bolder and hit the short putts firmer which you can do as the greens get slower. The downside with this is that you actually make the hole smaller and a number of putts will go far enough past that missing the return putt becomes a possibility. Neither method is wrong, but if you had to accept a miss, would you rather see it dribble offline or bash it in and have the odd 3 putt from short range? The choice is yours.