Symptom
I never know how high to tee the ball
You guess the tee height, or it changes from hole to hole, so teed shots come off the crown, the top edge or the bottom grooves, and the miss changes with the height.
Where the ball meets the face changes both how it launches and how it curves, so two shots that look alike from behind can come from different strikes. The questions work back from what the face and the flight show you.
Common ways golfers describe this
How high should I tee the ball?
Am I teeing it too high?
Teeing the ball too low
How much of the ball should be above the club?
Should I tee up my iron on a par 3?
- Your strike
- Face centre
- Offset from centre
Narrow it to one cause
Each question is here because golfers answer it differently, and that difference is what rules a cause out. Nothing is generated while you answer: every question, cause and fix was written and checked in advance.
A few questions · no account needed
What you will be asked
- Tee a ball the way you normally would and sole your driver behind it. How much of the ball sits above the top edge of the club?
- Mark the face of your driver and hit five tee shots. Where do the marks sit up and down the face?
- Lay a club along your toes, tee a ball for your driver, and look down. Where does the ball sit along your stance?
- After a normal drive, what has happened to the tee?
- How do you decide how far to push the tee into the ground?
Where this can come from
These are the causes this symptom resolves to, in the order they turn up most often. That order is not a diagnosis and it is not your answer: two of them can produce a shot that looks identical from behind. Each has a fix you can read now, whether or not you answer anything.
Tee height wrong for the delivery
Teed too high for the way the club is being delivered, contact creeps toward the crown. Teed too low, it drops to the bottom grooves. Either way the strike leaves the middle of the face, and with a driver that is worth more distance than most swing changes.
Read the fix
Hitting down on a teed ball
The low point falls before a ball that is sitting above the ground, so the club is still descending at contact. Spin rises, launch drops, and the strike climbs the face toward the crown. It is the single most common reason a driver goes shorter than a three wood.
Read the fix
Strike high on the face
Contact above the centre of gravity reduces spin and raises launch, which off a tee can be useful. Off the turf it usually means the club has slid under a ball sitting up in the grass. Ball speed drops either way, so the shot climbs higher than it should and still comes up short.
Read the fix
Strike low on the face
Contact below the centre of gravity loses ball speed and, through vertical gear effect, raises spin while lowering launch. That is the least efficient combination there is for distance, and it is why a low strike feels solid and still goes nowhere.
Read the fix
Ball too far back in the stance
The ball sits well before the low point, so the club is still descending steeply when it arrives and delivers less loft than the club actually carries. Flight is low and the ball meets the face while the path is still travelling right, which is why a back ball position so often adds a push or a hook.
Read the fix
No repeatable setup or routine
Aim, ball position, stance width and grip get rebuilt slightly differently on every shot, so face angle, low point and strike location all vary with them. Address is the reference the whole swing is measured from, and a reference that moves explains misses that seem to have no pattern.
Read the fix
Related symptoms
These are not here because they sound similar. Each one can come from a cause on the list above, which is why fixing one sometimes quietly fixes another. The closest matches are first.
- I strike it well off the ground but badly off a teeShots off the turf behave, but once the ball is teed up the strike, the height and the direction all fall apart, because nothing in the setup or the delivery changed for a ball sitting above the ground.Shares tee height wrong for the delivery
- Skying it off the teeThe top edge or crown of the club catches the ball, it pops almost straight up, lands a fraction of its normal distance away, and leaves a scuff mark on top of the head.Shares tee height wrong for the delivery
- Hitting it high on the faceThe marks sit above the centre of the face, up toward the top grooves rather than on the crown, and the shot climbs higher than it should and still comes up short.Shares strike high on the face
- Hitting it low on the faceThe marks sit below the centre of the face, in the bottom grooves or on the bottom edge, and the shot launches low, spins too much and falls well short of the club's distance.Shares tee height wrong for the delivery
- Losing distanceShots carry noticeably shorter than they should with the same club, sometimes even when the strike felt solid, and a shorter club goes as far as a longer one.Shares hitting down on a teed ball
- Flop shots slide under the ball or get bladedThe high, soft shot either pops straight up and travels a few feet, or catches the ball thin and races low over the green.Shares strike high on the face
What this rests on
- What is Smash Factor in Golf?TrackMan, accessed 2026
- The physics of golf: The convex face of a driverA. Raymond Penner, 2001
- Search for the Perfect Swing: The Proven Scientific Approach to Fundamentally Improving Your GameAlastair Cochran and John Stobbs, for the Golf Society of Great Britain, 2005 reissue, originally 1968
If something here contradicts what a launch monitor tells you, say so. Corrections change the page.
Discussion
Golfers who have had this shot, on what it turned out to be and what sorted it. Read it as experience rather than diagnosis: the questions above are what narrow it to a cause.
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