How high should a golfer tee up the ball with their 3-wood, other fairway woods or hybrids? After all, these clubs are not like a driver, and the proper tee height for irons is different. Besides, golfers don't all tee up the ball at the same height -- high or low.
How high should a golfer tee up the ball when using fairway woods and hybrids?
With fairway woods and hybrids off the tee, most golfers would obviously use a lower tee height than a driver. However, the question isn't tee height on its own; rather, the question is how high to tee the ball relative to the face height of the golf club being used.
Generally speaking, the best height for teeing it up with fairway woods and hybrids is to tee the ball so that a little less than the top half of the ball is showing above the crown at address. Typically, players are not swinging up very much, if at all, with fairway woods and hybrids as they have considerably more loft than driver. The idea is to make solid contact and use the height of the tee to give yourself a little bit of wiggle room in the event that you don't catch the ball flush -- which happens a lot for most golfers.
Gary McCord, formerly of CBS Sports, gave a great tip about how high to tee up the golf ball with a driver. It's a good starting point for most players. Tee up the golf ball with a driver so that about half the ball can be seen over the top of the face when looking down at it or down the hole. That's not a perfect piece of advice, but it is a good place to start.
Experiment with that placement on the range and on the course, and see how it works for your game. You can of course tee the ball lower to try to hit a stinger-type shot -- a shot that starts lower and stays lower throughout the ball flight so that the ball gets running on the ground quickly. More often than not, though, you're using less than driver as a percentage play to find the fairway more safely, so the standard approach to tee height is going to work.
