By Jack Moorehouse
Wedges are among the most sophisticated clubs in your bag. In fact, they’re almost as sophisticated as drivers. Wedges come with a wide variety of designs and features and a broad range of lofts and bounce angles. Yet you probably pay as much attention to your wedges as you do to a sand trap. This disinterest may be packing strokes onto your golf handicap. If you’re serious about lowering your golf handicap, learn more about wedges.
Some golfers think shaft length, shaft flex, turf conditions, and lie when it comes to wedges. These factors are important. They can dramatically affect your shot. But sole design is probably the most important factor when selecting wedges. Sole design, which includes bounce angle, determines how your club reacts to the ground (or the sand) on impact. Other factors are gaps between wedges—as we’ve said in our golf tips newsletter—and sole design variation.
Effective Bounce Is The Key
Bounce is the distance of the bottom of the sole extending below the clubface’s leading edge when the club is squarely soled in the impact position—something often mentioned in golf lessons. Bounce is completely independent of loft, length, weight, and shaft flex. In other words, there’s no assigned bounce to specific types of wedges. The club’s designer chooses its bounce. But there is an optimal bounce for each of your wedges that will provide the best results for you and your swing. Get to know what the optimal bounce is for each wedge.
Depth of bounce also matters in wedge performance. Depth of bounce, as you may have heard in golf instructions sessions, determines the wedge’s “effective bounce” at impact. Effective bounce depends on how much bounce is designed into the club’s sole, how deep it is in the sole, and how open the clubface is at impact. An open clubface can dramatically affect a wedge’s performance. Wedges come with shallow, deep, or anywhere-in-between bounce. Shallow bounce wedges don’t change effective bounce much. Deep-bounce wedges do.
Gaps Between Wedges
Some golfers carry only two wedges—a pitching wedge, with a loft of about 48 degrees, and a sand wedge, with a loft of about 56 degrees. This approach leaves a huge gap between wedge lofts. Other golfers use three wedges, which let you easily cover shots from 100-yards in. They carry a pitching wedge for full wedge shots (about 100 yards out), a sand wedge used for shots about 30 yards out, and a gap wedge, with about 52 degrees of loft, for shots in between. Some golfers with low golf handicaps also carry either a lob wedge and/or a flop wedge. (We recommend carrying three or four wedges in our golf tips newsletter.)
Sole Design Variation
Sole design variation is just as important as gap coverage when it comes to wedges. You want to carry a set of wedges with a variety of sole designs to handle a broad range of lies. For example, always carry at least one wedge with a small and shallow-bounce sole design for hardpan and other hard-ground lies, and at least one wedge with a deep-bounce sole design for deep rough or sugar-fine sand. You never know what kind of lie you may be facing. Having the proper sole variation covers all contingencies.
As you can see, wedges are rather complex clubs. If you’re among those players who seldom think about them, you may want to change that approach. They can help shave strokes off your golf handicap, so the more you learn about them—whether through attending golf instructions sessions or reading golf tips—the better.
Also, when assembling a wedge set, remember these factors: bounce, gaps between wedges, and differences in sole variations. Above all, tailor your set to what you face the most, but have a wedge or two you can substitute when playing courses with different conditions.
