Golf Tips with River Strand’s Corey Pion

Pitching is a key facet to anyone’s successful short game. So River Strand Golf and Country Club head pro Corey Pion is here with this week’s Bradenton Herald Golf Tip on hitting pitch shots from both the rough and tighter lies in the fairway-cut grass.

And it’s important not to get the face too open, either, Pion said that causes scooping under the ball in the rough.

“Most of the time, it’s because they’re trying to help the ball into the air and when they do that, they actually flip the wrists,” Pion said. “And anytime you try to flip the wrists, a lot can go wrong. When you chunk a shot or thin a shot in the short game, the majority of the time it’s because we have lower body movement. So if we keep our weight on our left side, it’s going to have us have a little steeper angle of attack, which should help us hit down on the ball. If we slide our weight back, chances are we’re going to slide it forward and finish with our weight on our back side and that’s when a lot of time we come up and hit that thin shot.”

This story was originally published July 22, 2016 at 10:00 PM with the headline "Golf Tips with River Strand’s Corey Pion."