Tip Tuesday: Adjusting Your Stance to Hit a Draw or Fade

In this video, Scott Tanguay of the Coastal Golf Academy in Myrtle Beach, S.C. demonstrates how some basic adjustments in your alignment help you execute both a draw and a fade. See what you need to do with both your stance line and club face to execute each.

Scott Tanguay:

Hey guys, Scott Tanguay here at the Coastal Golf Academy, right across the street from Myrtle Beach International Airport. Come by and see me!

Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about good alignment and then how we’re going to change alignment in the club face to hit a draw or a fade. Right? Very simple. Keep it simple.

First off, let’s go with just a straight shot. What I see the most out of my students is their stance line points way too much at the target line. So when you get in here from the teacher view back there, you feel like you’re aimed at the target, but really we’re shut to the target. We want the face on a straight shot to be more there, where we’re going to line up a little bit left. We call it parallel left. Okay? So if we’re here, you shouldn’t be looking over your shoulder, pointing it at the target. It should feel like it’s a little bit left. That’s just for your standard straight shot.

If you want to curve the ball, I would tell you the easiest way to go about that is to keep the face pointed at the target line or orange stick here, and then we’re going to manipulate our stance a little bit. If we want to hit a fade, we’re going to have our stance line open to the left a little bit with the face still pointing at the hole. What that’s going to do is allow me to swing down my body line with the face still at the target. That should give it a little bit of bend from left to right. Let’s see. So we’ve got the face at the hole, body aimed a little bit to the left. Right, and we’re going to see that peel off a little bit to the right.

If we want to do a draw, we’re just going to do the opposite. Put that ball in there. We’re going to shut the stance to the target a little bit. Okay, we come in. Face is still square. Right? That’s what makes it easy, face square to the target. If my body’s a little closed, it almost gives you the illusion that the face is shut so we can start curving it the other way. So we’ve got face at the orange, stance on the blue, and then let my swing just dictate that body line there. You’re going to see that thing start curving from right to left. Give it a try!