What Is Golf Ball Position Drift and How To Combat It?

For most experienced golfers, ball position doesn’t suddenly change. It creeps. 

One windy day you nudge the ball a touch back in your stance to keep it down. On a tight tee shot you push it a fraction forward because you’re chasing height. You hit a couple of fat irons, so you quietly move it back a touch “just for this shot”. None of those changes feel like much in the moment… but a few rounds later, your “normal” ball position is nowhere near where it started. 

Coaches see this all the time. Top instructors working with tour players have said that one of the most common bad habits they see creep into a player’s golf swing is ball position gradually shifting without the player noticing. That’s on tour, with cameras, TrackMan, and a coach watching. So amateur golfers—who rarely have a coach standing behind them—are even more vulnerable to silent drift. 

We think about ball position drift in three main categories: 

1. Environmental drift (wind, lies, course setup)

• • Into the wind, many players move the ball slightly back to lower flight. Articles on playing in the wind commonly suggest this adjustment.
    

  • On firm, tight lies, golfers often move the ball back for “safety”, especially with wedges.
    

  • On uphill or downhill lies, we instinctively nudge the ball to “help it up” or “keep it down”.

The problem is that these “one-off” adjustments often never get fully reset. What started as a wind tweak for a round becomes your new normal.

2. Compensation drift (reacting to bad shots)

Miss a couple of pushes right with the driver and it’s tempting to move the ball forward to “give the face more time to close”. Hit a few thin wedges and you creep it back. Those micro-adjustments can help in the moment, but they’re usually band-aids. Over time, they turn into a totally different setup.

In fact, some articles on ball position explicitly mention that many golfers’ ball positions drift from front to middle to back “without knowing it”.

3. Routine drift (losing your baseline)

If you don’t have a clear, repeatable reference for where the ball should be for each club type, your brain will anchor on “looks about right today”, which is a moving target. Small day-to-day variations in posture, alignment, and stance width all change how “right” looks.

That’s why pros use alignment sticks and visual references constantly on the range to keep their setup fundamentals from wandering. Driver setup guides aimed at better players routinely list “check ball position” as a basic you should always revisit. 

Even The Pros Experience It

John Sherman, talking with PGA Tour Pro Michael Kim on his Podcast ‘The Sweet Spot’, explains how even tour pros experience ball position drift. 

“Even at your level, basic things like ball position can start drifting throughout the season and you might not even realise it until it's too late. 

All of a sudden like three months in you're like “Oh My God like I have it so far up in my stance…” I've had this conversation. Yeah my ball position just got out of whack. 

And you'd think like how is that possible? And it's just like every week it just moves like a quarter of an inch and you're like “Oh wow this is a problem”.”

[The Sweet Spot Podcast, 8 Sep 2025]

How Does It Affect Us Amateurs?

This is also best summed up by this same discussion on The Sweet Spot podcast, when they also discuss how amateurs can experience this when their game is suddenly off for no reason, which will resonate with many of us. 

“You haven't played in two months and you show up on your Buddies trip and you feel out of whack and you're getting angry and you're not playing well. And I just want people to understand like the lengths that you have to go through week to week to recalibrate and everyone else who doesn't have the time or the resources to do this…yeah… that is the reason you just show up one day and just don't know what you're doing at all relative to your skill level.”

 

How to Combat Ball Position Drift?

Fighting ball position drift starts with having a record of your ‘normal’ ball positions for reference. Your ball positions are unique to you. Most amateurs will start off with the ‘standard’ ball positions they hear about from all the top coaches, but if you’ve refined yours for your best ball flight, you’d best have those recorded somewhere. 

Starting every practice with a warmup that involves hitting from your normal ball positions, will help you to avoid your ball position drifting over time. That could involve working through your bag from wedge up to driver for warmup, and paying attention to how your normal ball position feels on that particular day. 

Some days your ‘normal’ ball position will feel more forward or back than you anticipated, and some days it will feel just right. 

But keeping it consistent is the most important thing. That will allow your swing to ‘groove’ for that same ball position, without having to subconsciously compensate for a ball that’s moving all over the place. 

How to Record Your Own Ball Positions?

One easy way to record your own reference ball positions is with the Stance IQ training mat. It includes the ‘standard’ ball positions for your players of your height, but also has areas for recording your own personal ball positions and stance widths. 

Another other option for recording your ball positions is to mark them up on an alignment stick and use this as a reference. 

Whatever your method, use this as your reference of your normal ball positions. 

How to Recalibrate When It’s Off?

A great way to get comfortable with your normal ball position again is to chuck your reference ball positions down at the range and work through your bag, at least until your normal positions feel familiar again. 

Then you could test yourself against your reference positions, using a drill such as the Challenge Drill with the Stance IQ, which is basically covering up reference to your normal ball positions and trying to place the ball correctly each time, before checking how far out you are. 

This test and learn approach should get you back to feeling familiar with your normal ball positions before you know it.