Dave Phillips shapes draws and fades with trail-hand feels, same setup

Dave Phillips, a Golf Digest Top 100 Teacher and co-founder of the Titleist Performance Institute, posted a new Titleist Golf Tips video on how to hit a draw or a fade without rebuilding your address. The cue is the trail hand.

Phillips starts with the radar basics: path and face decide start line and curve. An out-to-in path with a closed face tends to pull; the same path with an open face curves left-to-right for a right-handed player. An in-to-out path with a face closing relative to that path can push or hook. He says that mix confuses amateurs, so he simplifies it through the trail hand as a stand-in for the clubface.

The two feels

• High fade: keep your normal setup. Through impact, feel a karate-chop or palm-up / palm-under the handle so the face stays more open. In the video he hits a high shot that fades right with that feel alone.
• Low draw: same stance and ball position. Feel the trail palm more down through the ball, like a topspin forehand, so the face closes relative to an out-to-the-right path.

He is explicit that he is not moving the ball back in the stance or opening the body to manufacture shape. "I take my normal setup. I'm not putting it back in my stance and doing all these different things," he says. The palm-up shot and the palm-down shot produce two different shapes from the same address.

Nine-ball drill

Hit three balls with the fade feel, three with the draw feel, then three straight with the trail palm square to the target through impact. Phillips frames it as bringing "intrinsic feels" back so players stop over-managing path and stance every time they want a curve.

For sim golfers on a launch monitor, the drill maps cleanly to a range session: lock stance, change only the trail-hand cue, and watch start line and spin axis move. The full tip runs about five minutes and is embedded above.