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Tee it High or Low?


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The right answer could give you 18 more yards with your driver

By Alan Bastable
Associate Editor, GOLF MAGAZINE

You're on the tee of a brutal 470-yard par 4 and really need to bust one if you're going to get home in two. What's your swing key?

One thing you're probably not thinking about is how high you teed your ball. But you should be. Tweaking your tee height, it turns out, can be one of the best�and easiest�adjustments you can make to pound higher and longer drives.

Our Study

Who took part
Twenty-seven golfers, aged 25 to 71, with handicaps ranging from scratch to 29. Of the players, 25 typically used a mid-height tee and two preferred a high tee.

The tee heights
At the low tee height, the top edge of the ball was even with the top edge of the driver so that the entire ball was below the crown.

At the mid tee height, half of the ball was above the crown.

At the high tee height, the bottom edge of the ball was slightly above the top edge of the clubface so that the entire ball was above the crown.

Our Experiment

The players were divided into three groups of nine by handicap level: 0-9, 10-19, and 20-and-above. Each golfer hit 10 drives at each tee height, with each group hitting from the three tee heights in varying order to ensure that fatigue and motivation were balanced within each group. Only the best five out of 10 drives at each tee height were recorded so that mis-hits would not skew the data. Participants used their own drivers, with clubheads ranging from 410 cc to 460 cc.

Carry distance was measured by a launch monitor, which also calculated launch angle, clubhead speed, ball speed and spin. Accuracy was also recorded: drives that landed in the fairway (33 yards wide) scored 1; those that landed in the right or left rough (17 yards wide) scored 2; and those that landed beyond the rough scored 3.

The Results

Within each of the three handicap levels, carry distance for mid- and high-tee heights was significantly longer than the low-tee height, largely an effect of the higher tees promoting higher launch angles and less spin. The high tee height provided the most distance, giving the players an average of 12 yards more carry per drive than the low tee height.

Inside the Numbers

The Biggest Winners

The high-handicappers benefited the most from the high tee height, picking up an average of 18 yards over their drives on the low tee height!

Long and straight
The increases in carry distance from the low- to the mid- and high-tee heights did not come at the expense of accuracy in terms of hitting the fairway. This table presents the percentage of tee shots landing in the fairway, rough and beyond the rough as a function of tee height.

	Fairway	Rough	Beyond Rough
Low tee	58.5%	30.4%	11.1%
Mid tee	54.1%	34.1%	11.9%
High tee	61.5%	27.4%	11.1%

The Aftermath

Following the experiment, 9 out of 27 (or one-third of) players planned to change from mid to high tee height. Three of those nine were from the low-handicap group.

The mid tee height also performed well in our experiment.

All three handicap groups lost distance on the low tee.

The tee height study was conducted by Eric Alpenfels, a GOLF Magazine Top 100 Teacher in Pinehurst, N.C., and Bob Christina, Ph.D., dean emeritus of the School of Health and Human Performance at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

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