Justin Rose is one of the best wedge players in the game, making his money from his ability to stick the ball close on his approaches to the green.
That’s how, at the age of 45, he’s been able to keep pace with some of the greatest players in the world on the biggest stages.
Rose won the St. Jude Championship, the FedEx Cup playoff opener, and took Rory McIlroy to a playoff at the Masters in 2025. That made him an automatic qualifier for the Ryder Cup 17 years on from his first appearance.
A reliable wedge game is an incredible asset for any amateur hoping to bring down their score, and Rose has a simple drill to improve accuracy from around 100 yards from the pin.
Justin Rose shows amateurs how to improve accuracy with wedges
For Rose’s drill, all you need is a wedge and an alignment stick to ensure you are rotating your body, following through after contact, and maintaining control over your club face.
Speaking to Golf Life, he demonstrated: “If you don’t really keep your body turning, you can start to get quite flippy with your hands. With a wedge, you really want to be quite accurate, so you want to control the club face.”
Rose put an alignment stick to extend his club’s shaft beyond his shoulder and revealed a straightforward drill for amateurs.
He continued, “If you hold the stick as an extension of the shaft, if you come into the ball and you feel like your body stops, the stick will slap you in the side.
“So if you can feel like you keep your body moving with your hands slightly ahead of the ball, that’s key to getting a good flight on your wedges. You don’t want to be scooping it.
“If you keep your hands ahead of the ball and you keep turning, the stick will miss your body. That’s just a really nice way to feel like you’re controlling your club face and getting a good angle of attack to get the right flight on your wedges.”
Sergio Garcia revealed the most important thing in golf is controlling the club one foot before the ball, and one foot after it. Rose’s drill is in tune with this advice, allowing amateurs more command over their club around the point of contact.
Justin Rose reveals the hardest thing to control in a golf shot
Rose said that playing in the wind invokes an entirely different thought process. Where in a full wedge swing, he would typically bring his backswing back to 11 O’Clock, if imagining his swing radius was an analogue clock, he would have to club up and swing less into the wind.
That’s to take spin off of the shot and make his ball flight lower, but Rose admitted that even for the best players in the world, spin is the hardest thing to control in golf.
He said, “The windier it is, I’d never go to the hard lobber. I’d probably go to the more flighted shot, which would be the 9:30 or the 10. The flight comes down generally.
“Also, trying to control spin more than anything. The harder you hit a wedge, the more spin you’re going to generate.
“If the greens are really soft, for a 99 shot I might even go for my 52 degree wedge, and try and bump one in there so I don’t have to deal with the backspin. That’s the hardest thing to control. You know it’s going to spin, but often you don’t know if it’s going to spin two yards or six yards.
“If you land in a tiny upslope compared to a flat bit, it makes a big difference, and those are things you can’t quite control. So you always want to think, ‘What’s the best decision I can make to control the ball to the best of my ability?’”
Even for the best in the game, it’s about course management. Manage your misses, and accept what you cannot control.