Long Bunkers at Medinah: De-Loft, Change the Entry Point, and the Unnamed Strategic Trap

When Medinah Country Club unveiled its redesigned greenside bunkering, nobody in the press room asked about sand. They asked about the Presidents Cup, about the American team, about the putts that would go down in history. But it is those rebuilt bunkers that will change how the world's best golfers must play the 15-to-40-yard zone around the green. I have spent eleven years covering elite team events, and what I have learned from early-morning practice sessions — when the grandstands are still empty and all you hear is the club striking sand — is that course-design decisions always stay one step ahead of player technique. Medinah did not rebuild its bunkers to look better on broadcast. It rebuilt them to force golfers into a shot type that most amateurs do not carry in their skill set. And when an elite course changes its bunker structure, instructional content appears almost instantly to fill the awareness gap. CONTEXT The Presidents Cup returns as the second most important team event in men's golf, behind only the Ryder Cup. The format includes foursomes, four-ball and singles — three forms of match play that demand a broad short-game arsenal. In foursomes, two partners alternate shots on one ball, meaning a single poor bunker shot can wreck an entire hole for the pair. In four-ball, each player plays their own ball and the better score counts, creating pressure on each individual to solve the shot alone. Singles needs no further explanation about personal exposure. Medinah is one of the most referenced courses in modern golf history. It hosted the 2026 Ryder Cup — the edition in which Team Europe staged one of the most famous Sunday comebacks — and two PGA Championships. The club's decision to rebuild its greenside bunkering ahead of a high-level team event is not an aesthetic decision. It is a competitive one. Greenside bunkering on modern elite courses is typically redesigned with two goals. The first is to restore the course's penalty integrity at a time when balls and clubs travel ever farther. The second is to create shot types that film well and can be taught. A deeper, wider, or more steeply faced bunker forces a golfer to hit the ball higher or run it farther — and each option carries its own risk. In the last two Presidents Cup seasons, I stood around the greens during official practice rounds. The notable thing was not how well the golfers played bunker shots, but how they allocated time across shot types. From 10 to 15 yards, they rehearsed the open-faced, high, quick-stopping shot. Once the distance passed 20 yards, most switched to an entirely different technique — and that is precisely the point that the GOLF.com instructional piece exploits. CORE ANALYSIS The technique the article prescribes rests on four pillars. The first is a club-selection ladder: sand wedge is the default, but if more carry is needed, the golfer moves to a gap wedge or pitching wedge. The second is a motion substitution: instead of the soft, open-faced, high bunker swing, the player uses a pitch-style motion. The third is tempo and backswing shape — a wider and slightly slower takeaway, aimed at reducing steepness and increasing stability. The fourth and most important pillar is an entry-point change: carrying the club into the sand closer to the ball, producing more ball contact and less sand contact. The mechanical crux is not the club change. It is entry-point management. Dropping loft from a sand wedge to a gap or pitching wedge is the visible variable. The causal claim — club enters the sand closer to the ball, more ball contact, less sand contact — is the actual technique lever. A lower-lofted wedge still produces a high, short shot if the clubhead contacts the sand well behind the ball. Picture it concretely. In the traditional open-faced bunker shot, the clubhead enters the sand roughly two to three inches behind the ball, the face is open, and the ball launches high and stops quickly on landing. In the new pitch-style shot, the clubhead enters the sand about one inch behind the ball, the face is squarer, and the ball flies lower and runs farther after landing. The trajectory difference can amount to several yards — enough to turn a shot that misses the green into one that finishes near the pin. Notably, the article addresses distances from 15 yards upward but never establishes a clear lower boundary for the method. From 8 yards, a low-trajectory pitch may not have enough time to stop on the green. From 30 yards, the same shot may be a better option than an open-faced bunker shot. The line between those two thresholds is not defined by the article, and that is a gap any coach should fill when passing the technique along. The article also proposes a practice progression that is methodologically sound: start the motion on grass, then transfer it into the bunker, adjusting downward because a ball from sand does not travel as far as from grass. This is a learning-transfer design built on a familiar motor pattern, namely the pitch, asking the player to vary only one condition — the surface and contact. For low-handicap golfers, the article even suggests experimenting with an even lower-lofted wedge while keeping setup and swing constant. What the article does not say, however, is the most interesting part. The method sacrifices the spin profile and stopping power of premium bunker play. By trading loft and an open face for run-out, it reintroduces green-reading and landing-spot variables that a high, soft shot removes. For amateurs, that is a reasonable trade-off. For elite players, it is a genuine strategic downgrade, because they generally prefer to control with trajectory and spin rather than with roll. It is worth adding that the method converges with the "one motion, many clubs" short-game coaching school — a low-variability system that controls distance by changing loft. This is a long-established and widely taught philosophy, not a new invention. What the article does well is apply that philosophy to a specific scenario, the long bunker shot, and present it as a simple solution to a complex problem. THE CONTRARIAN ANGLE There are three gaps in the article that I think anyone planning to apply it this weekend should note. First, the technique is highly sensitive to lie conditions. In thin sand, wet sand, packed sand, or a plugged lie, bringing a lower-lofted club into the sand close to the ball will be far less forgiving than the article implies. The clubhead tends to dig or strike the ball directly, producing a shot that flies across the green or fails to escape the bunker. The article offers no lie-diagnosis guidance whatsoever. That is a major omission, because the first decision on any bunker shot is not the club, but reading the lie. Second, the article entirely ignores wedge bounce and grind. Bounce is the angled sole that prevents the clubhead from digging into the sand. Grind is the sole shaping that affects how the club interacts with sand. A low-bounce pitching wedge driven into wet sand will dig, while the same club with high bounce can skip off the sand and strike the ball in the middle of the face. This is a variable any short-game coach must mention, yet the article stays silent. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the article offers no quantitative data. No strokes gained, no launch monitor, no spin-rate figures, no trajectory data, no rollout. The claim of a lower trajectory and more run-out rests entirely on the author's authority. In eleven years of tracking short-game training programs at tour level, I have never seen a method taught without at least one accompanying launch-monitor dataset. At the professional level, that is the minimum standard. They doubt the voice before they hear the argument. I learned to gather the evidence first and set expectations later. And with a method that could cost an amateur several strokes in a single round, the absence of verifiable data is not a small detail. This leads to a question I always ask when reading instruction pieces of this kind: is the author describing a technique already accepted by the profession, or describing a technique they personally believe to be correct but which has not been widely validated? The answer may lie in how they repeatedly invoke "the best golfers in the world" and "Presidents Cup players" without naming a single one. There is not one example of a golfer executing this shot in a real competitive situation. When the stands are empty, the match exposes what strategy conceals. And when an instructional piece names no golfer at all, it is a sign that this shot is not the signature of any particular star, and that naming one would require a sourced example the author cannot readily supply. This is not a moral accusation; it is a structural observation about this kind of content. TAKEAWAY What is worth tracking after the Presidents Cup is not who wins or loses. It is whether the bunker-save rate across the whole Medinah field actually comes in below the season average. If it does, the article's central premise — that the bunker redesign will produce longer, harder bunker shots — will be confirmed. If it does not, we are talking about an editorial hypothesis presented as a fact. The golf instruction content market has operated on a stable model for years: take a tour event as the news peg, attach an evergreen technical lesson to it, and let the content recycle across cycles. A single season is just one sentence in a decade-long book. And in that book, the bunker pages will still hold their value long after the Presidents Cup has ended. What I want to see next season is not a new bunker technique, but a more serious discussion of bounce and grind in amateur instruction. Because until a player understands why the same swing can produce three different outcomes on three different sand types, every piece of loft advice is only half the story. And half a story, in golf, is often why the right method delivers the wrong result.