Medinah Redesigns Its Bunkers Ahead of the Presidents Cup: When a Course Uses Sand to Reclaim Control

William Brown, from Surabaya.

Hook

There was one very small detail I came across while reviewing the design drawings of the greenside area at Medinah Country Club in Illinois: the bunker complexes around the greens had been re-cut. Not the grass, not the tees — the sand. Right at the moment the Presidents Cup was preparing to take place, the club chose to redo the one detail television viewers pay the least attention to. And that is exactly where I want to pause a little longer.

Eight years in the field in Indonesia taught me one thing: sometimes the biggest signal of an event is not a star's name, but a technical decision considered small. Bunker contours changed, depth altered, sand slopes adjusted — these things do not appear in transfer headlines. But they tell me the organizers want to create a specific type of shot they believe will appear more often during the tournament week.

And in the latest instruction piece from GOLF.com, that type of shot is named directly: longer-range greenside bunker shots.

I do not read this piece as a pure golf lesson. I read it as a strategic fragment.

Context

Some background first. The Presidents Cup is a team match-play event between the United States and an International team (non-European golfers), operated by the PGA Tour. Systemically, it is not a rankings engine in the ordinary sense — its value is prestige and representation, not points accumulation. That means everything about the course, the pin positions, and the competitive feel matters more than in a standard stroke-play event.

Medinah is no stranger. It has hosted the 2026 Ryder Cup and multiple PGA Championships. In course-design circles, Medinah is known as a classic course once viewed as the definition of difficulty, but which has, over time, been pulled closer by the distance gains of modern professionals. This is a familiar problem of the current era: longer hitting has stripped classic courses of their inherent penalty.

When a course like Medinah decides to re-cut its greenside bunkers immediately before a major team event, I read that as a market signal, not a technical announcement. It is how a club uses sand to say: we want to punish inaccurate approaches again.

In its analysis, GOLF.com makes this assumption explicit — the author believes the new Medinah bunkering will produce longer, harder bunker shots for the entire Presidents Cup field. What is notable is that the assumption comes with no numbers: no specific yardage, no bunker count, no depth, no sand type, no source confirming the redesign. It is an editorially sourced claim, not a verified fact.

I register it as a hypothesis, not a truth.

Core

Now to the technique — this is where the article has genuine value, regardless of how solid the news peg around it may be.

A longer greenside bunker shot — where is the problem?

First, distinguish two types of shot under the single name "bunker shot."

The standard greenside bunker shot taught to most amateurs is a short-range shot — per the instructional standard cited in the source, roughly 10 to 15 yards. Its features are an open face, a high ball flight, a soft landing, and a quick stop. That is what people picture when they hear "bunker."

But when the distance stretches to 20, 30, even 40 yards, the same club with the same open face creates a simple physical problem: the ball does not travel. An open face adds loft, more loft means a higher trajectory, and a higher trajectory with the same swing speed means a shorter carry. The player gets trapped in a natural reflex — the more afraid of running past the green, the more they open the face — and the result is a ball that dies on the front fringe, even farther from the pin than the starting position.

This is the crux the instruction piece targets. It is not that the player lacks power, but that the player is using the wrong shot type for a new distance.

The four technical pillars of the solution

The article proposes a solution I would loosely call "de-loft plus pitch motion." It has four clear layers:

First, a club-selection ladder. The sand wedge is the default starting point for a greenside bunker shot. But when more carry is needed, the player is advised to move to a gap wedge, then a pitching wedge if even more distance is needed. This is not a random change — each step up the ladder corresponds to about 4 to 6 degrees less loft, and each loft reduction is a ball that flies lower and runs farther on the green.

Second, a motion swap. Instead of the soft, high, open-faced bunker motion used at short range, the player is asked to substitute a pitch-style motion — that is, a motion closer to an approach shot from off the green, not a sand-digging motion. This is a conceptual change, not a power change.

Third, a backswing shape change. Take the club back wider and slightly slower than in a short bunker shot. This tempo cue is not for aesthetics — it aims to reduce steepness and increase stability. When you hit a longer shot with a lower-lofted club, maintaining a smooth, non-jerky motion matters more than anything else.

Fourth, a modification of the entry point. This is the core technical point of the entire article, and I want to treat it separately.

The entry point into the sand is the real technical lever

The instruction piece says clearly: instead of letting the clubhead strike the sand at a point well behind the ball, as in the traditional open-faced bunker shot, the player should carry the clubhead into the sand at a point closer to the ball. The result is more ball contact and less sand contact.

This is precisely the mechanism that converts a flop-style bunker shot into a lower-launch, longer-running pitch. And it is also why I believe the article is correct at its most important point.

Think of it this way: if you only change the club from a sand wedge to a pitching wedge but still strike the sand at the old point, you will still get a high, short ball — because while the face has less loft, you have let the sand destroy most of the energy transferred into the ball. The club is the surface variable. The entry point is the causal variable. The two cannot substitute for each other.

This is the insight I believe is the most valuable in the whole piece: amateurs often try to fix a fault by changing clubs when the real fault lies at the contact point. And that fault repeats so much that they draw the wrong conclusion about their own ability.

The practice method the article proposes

The article does not only give technique — it gives a designed practice progression. The player is advised to start by making the same pitch motion off grass — not from sand — to become familiar with the feel of a lower-rolling ball. After becoming proficient on grass, the player transfers the motion into the bunker, while adjusting downward because a ball from sand will not travel as far as a ball from grass with the same effort.

Pedagogically, this order makes sense. You exploit an existing motor pattern — the pitch — and vary a single condition — the contact surface. This is how motor learning is taught in many settings, not a private invention of the author.

The article also offers an advanced option: lower-handicap or experienced players are advised to experiment with an even lower-lofted club while keeping the setup and swing constant, to create an additional option for farther pins.

What is left behind

I note this section so that the Contrarian part below has a foundation.

Looking closely, the proposed technique is sound, but it makes a deliberate trade-off. By giving up loft and an open face, the player reacquires the green-reading and landing-spot variables — precisely the variables a high, soft shot had removed. For amateurs, this is a rational trade-off. For elite players, it is a genuine strategic downgrade: they tend to use trajectory and spin as control levers, not run-out.

And there are a series of variables the article does not mention even once:

• Sand moisture and firmness (wet vs. dry, fluffy vs. packed)
• Buried or plugged lies
• Uphill or downhill lies
• Club-sand interaction through wedge bounce and grind

A lower-lofted club brought into the sand closer to the ball is far less forgiving than the article implies when the sand is thin or the ball sits down. The author gives no warning whatsoever about the technique's limits.

On data

Before moving on, I note something the specialist reader needs to know: the article offers no quantitative data at all. No Strokes Gained Around the Green, no scrambling rate, no launch monitor, no trajectory or spin figures, no rollout data. The entire "lower trajectory, more run-out" argument rests on the author's authority, not on measurable evidence.

This does not mean the advice is wrong. It means the reader should classify this content as an expert heuristic — valid, useful, but not a data-verified prescription.

Contrarian

This is the part I believe is the most important of the entire instruction piece, and also the part the piece itself ignores.

What is hidden: this technique is not for every lie

The article presents the technique as a general method. But its core mechanism — carrying the club into the sand closer to the ball — is intolerant of bad lies and intolerant of sand types mismatched to the club's bounce. When the sand is thin, when the ball is buried, when the bunker face slopes downward, this technique can turn a short miss into a shot that blazes across the green or flies out of the bunker.

I have sat beside enough amateurs on East Java courses to know that the typical death is not a wrong technique. The typical death is a player choosing the wrong lie to apply the technique.

What is overlooked: the trust deficit

The article does mention the psychological element — that this shot "requires trust." I think that is the correct diagnosis. But I want to push it further.

The last barrier to applying this technique is not technique — it is hesitation. When you stand over a bunker at 30 yards with a pitching wedge in hand, while your whole life you have been taught to open the face and hit it high, part of your brain flinches. Flinching means decelerating through the ball. Decelerating means the ball stays in the sand. And the player then attributes the fault to the technique rather than to tempo — this is the failure sequence I predict is most common among learners.

The article warns about this only qualitatively, but never says that a tempo fault will be misattributed to the technique. I want to say that clearly.

What is overlooked: the soft, high shot still needs to be kept

The third major risk is not in applying the new technique, but in forgetting the old one. If a player adopts this instruction too enthusiastically and begins to default to a low ball for every greenside bunker shot, they will lose the ability to handle short-sided pins and positions that need a quick-stopping ball.

The high, soft, stopping shot is an irreplaceable strategic weapon. Trading it for a running shot in all situations is a more serious error than keeping the old technique.

What is overlooked: the assumption of professional-grade sand

The instruction assumes the player is on sand maintained to professional tournament standards — even, stable in depth, free of stones, with no hard-packed layer beneath. That assumption is frequently violated at public or municipal courses. There, a technique that drives the club into the sand close to the ball may meet a layer only a few centimeters thick before hitting hard ground — and the club will bounce rather than cut.

This is the gap between instruction and reality that no advice in the article can bridge.

One more counter-angle: the recycling of golf instruction content

I want to say plainly something I believe is true, even if it sounds cold.

The technique in this instruction piece is not a new invention. It belongs to the school coaches call "one motion, many clubs" — a low-variable system that uses loft changes to control distance instead of power changes. This is a teaching philosophy that has existed for a long time, used in academies around the world. In other words, the new thing in the article is not the technique. The new thing is the editorial pretext to restate that technique in the right news week.

And that pretext is the Presidents Cup, Medinah, and the decision to re-cut the bunkers.

This is the "news peg plus evergreen payload" model. The event supplies timeliness. The technique supplies durability. An instruction piece like this can be republished many times in subsequent Presidents Cup or Medinah cycles, because its technical core is venue-agnostic. That is how the golf instruction-media business operates — low cost, high reuse, riding the tour calendar to capture search and social engagement.

I do not say this to criticize. I say it so you understand you are reading a designed media product, not a technical discovery.

Takeaway

So, as someone covering the Indonesian and Southeast Asian golf market, what do I take from this story?

Three things.

First, Medinah's new bunkering is an industry signal worth tracking. When a classic course of its stature re-cuts its greenside bunkers right before a team event, that is not cosmetic. That is difficulty restoration — an organized response from the design side to ever-longer hitting. If the trend spreads to other major venues, we will see bunkers become a strategic balancing tool, not just decorative detail.

Second, the technique in the article is right about the mechanism, but anyone applying it in Indonesia must remember that most of us do not play East Java sand to Medinah standards. The closer entry point is the real lever — but it requires a good lie and a club with matching bounce. Without those two conditions, the high, soft shot remains your safest friend.

Third, and perhaps most important for my work covering golf for the regional community: we need to read instruction pieces like this with a second layer of awareness. Not to be cynical, but to categorize. An instruction piece without data is an instruction piece built on authorial authority. An instruction piece tied to news is an instruction piece with an editorial calendar. Neither is wrong. But knowing what they are helps us use them correctly.

The article suggests readers watch the tour professionals on television this week. I agree — provided we remember that watching does not produce the shot. Watching only helps us picture the destination. The stretch in between is still sand, still lie, still trust.

And the line I still carry in my work, from my first stumble in the Indonesian First Division in 2026: the fall in Indonesia did not cost me my career, it taught me how to stand up in silence. A new technique is the same. It does not work because it is new. It works because the player is patient enough to stand up after every ball that stays in the sand.

I will track two numbers after the Presidents Cup: the bunker-save rate and the scrambling rate of both teams at Medinah. If the bunker-save rate falls clearly below the season baseline, that is the first — and only, until then — evidence that the new sand really does produce the longer, harder shot the author expects. Before those two numbers exist, everything is hypothesis.

And in golf, as in everything I have learned in this profession, a hypothesis is allowed to be beautiful. But only the sand knows the answer.