Slice it off the tee and the instinct is to do something about your swing - grip tighter, roll the hands over, swing harder from the inside. It feels like a swing problem, so surely it needs a swing fix.
A coach’s instinct is the opposite. Before touching the swing, a good coach works through the setup first, because a slice is very often built in before the club ever moves. Get the address position wrong and even a decent swing has little choice but to leak the ball right.
Here’s the pre-swing checklist a PGA coach runs through before changing a single thing about how you actually swing the club.
1. They move the ball forward
This is the big one. A lot of slicers play the driver too far back in their stance - closer to the middle, where they’d play an iron. It feels natural, but it quietly sets up the slice.
The clubface squares up gradually through the swing. Catch the ball too early - too far back - and the face simply hasn’t had time to rotate back to square yet. It’s still open when it meets the ball. And an open face at impact is the definition of a slice, no matter how good the swing was.
The fix lives entirely at address. Moving the ball forward, up off the lead heel, gives the face the time it needs to arrive square - and lets you catch the driver slightly on the upswing, which is exactly what it’s designed for.
This is the point PGA on-course announcer and golf coach Mark Immelman (On the Mark podcast) discusses with his guest PGA coach Rick Currin on driver ball position: a ball played too far back makes it difficult to square the face before impact, and the result is a slice. It’s a setup change, not a swing change.
A quick word: test it for yourself
Before you commit to it, test this for yourself. Ball position interacts with your own swing, and for some golfers moving the ball forward changes the swing path more than it changes the face angle - so the result isn’t identical from one player to the next.
The point isn’t to copy an exact position. It’s to find the one that squares your face and straightens your ball flight, then take note of it. Once you know what works for you, the job becomes keeping it consistent from range session to range session, and round to round.
2. They check where you’re actually aimed
Once the slice has been around a while, golfers start aiming further left to give the ball room to curve back. It feels like a sensible workaround. It isn’t.
Aiming left opens your shoulders relative to the target, which steepens the swing and sends the club even more across the ball through impact - adding slice to the very shot you were trying to rescue. Coaches square the feet, hips and shoulders back up to the target line before they touch anything else. Often the slice shrinks the moment the aim is honest again. All of it happens at address.
3. They widen the stance and add a little tilt
A narrow stance with level shoulders encourages a steep, downward, out-to-in strike - the classic slicer’s swing. The setup itself is feeding the fault.
Widening the stance a touch gives a more stable base, and tilting the upper body slightly away from the target at address helps you catch the driver on the up rather than chopping down on it. Both nudge the strike toward a straighter, higher launch. Neither asks you to change what you do once the swing is in motion, they just give the swing a better starting point to work from.
4. They tee it higher
The simplest fix on the list. A low tee invites a downward strike, and a downward strike with a driver tends to come with an open, slicing face.
Teeing the ball higher - so roughly half of it sits above the crown of the driver at address - encourages you to catch it on the upswing with a squarer face. It’s a five-second change, before you’ve swung the club at all.
5. They make it repeatable
Here’s what coaches know that amateurs often miss: knowing the right positions is one thing, reproducing them every time is another.
Setup drifts. Over a few weeks the ball creeps back toward the middle, the stance narrows, the aim wanders (usually without you noticing) and one day the slice is back with no obvious cause. Tour players have a coach and alignment sticks checking them on every session. Most amateurs are working from memory and feel.
That’s the gap some golfers close with a reference they can lay down - one that marks the correct ball position and stance width for their clubs, so the setup is laid out in front of them instead of guessing. Golfers often use alignment sticks with markings or a training aid like Stance IQ so the right setup is easier to repeat, session to session. Whatever method you use, the goal is the same - lock in the setup that works for you, then stop it moving all over the place.
The takeaway
A slice feels like a swing problem, which is why golfers spend years trying to swing their way out of it. More often, the quickest path out runs through the setup - the same place a coach starts.
Before you reach for a new driver or rebuild your swing, check the things a coach would check first: where the ball sits, where you’re aimed, how you’re tilted, how high you’ve teed it. Find what straightens your flight, make a note of it, and keep it consistent. That’s the work the best players never skip - and it happens long before they ever touch the swing.