Bunker Play Drills for Junior Golfers

Almost every junior golfer’s first bunker shot goes badly. The ball either stays in the sand, skulls across the green, or both happen in the same round. That early experience sticks, and it creates something more stubborn than a technical flaw: an avoidance habit. A player who fears the bunker will start aiming away from trouble in ways that cost strokes long before the ball ever finds sand.

The fix is not more bunker shots hit at random. It is a specific progression that removes the guesswork, since most junior bunker fear comes from not knowing where the club is actually supposed to enter the sand. Once that single piece clicks, the fear usually drops fast, because the shot stops feeling like a gamble.

Bunker play is one piece of a broader short game. For how it fits alongside chipping, pitching, and putting, see our short game development guide.

A greenside bunker shot is not a normal golf swing. The single most important idea to teach a junior is this: the club does not hit the ball, it hits the sand behind the ball, and the sand pushes the ball out. Explaining it that way removes the instinct to scoop or help the ball into the air, which is the root cause of most skulled and stubbed bunker shots.

A simple setup checklist for a junior to run through:

• Dig the feet in slightly for stability and to gauge how firm or soft the sand is.
• Open the clubface a bit before taking the grip, so the bounce of the club, not the leading edge, meets the sand first.
• Ball slightly forward in the stance, roughly off the lead heel.
• Swing along the body line and commit fully through impact rather than decelerating into the sand.

Draw a straight line in the sand about two inches behind where the ball would sit. The goal is simple: swing down and make the club enter the sand right on that line, every time, with no ball present at first. This isolates the one skill that fixes almost every bad bunker shot, hitting sand in a consistent spot behind where the ball sits.

Once entry point is consistent on the bare line for ten swings in a row, add a ball just in front of the line and repeat the same swing. Many juniors are surprised how little changes when the ball is added, since the sand, not the ball, was always doing the work.

How to progress: narrow the target zone from a few inches to about one inch as consistency improves, then vary the line’s distance behind the ball to simulate different lies.

Deceleration, slowing the club down right before impact out of fear, is the single biggest cause of balls left in the bunker. The splash drill fixes this directly: the player must make the sand splash forward and up out of the bunker on every swing, with a full follow-through to a finish position that mirrors the backswing length.

A useful cue is to have the junior say “splash” out loud at the moment of impact. Saying it forces a committed swing through the sand rather than a tentative poke at it, and it gives a coach or parent an easy way to spot deceleration from outside the bunker.

How to progress: once splash and follow-through are automatic on flat lies, introduce an uphill or downhill stance, which changes how far behind the ball the club should enter without changing the core commitment through impact.

Once a junior can reliably get the ball out, the next skill is controlling how far it goes. Bunker distance control comes mostly from swing length and speed, not from changing the basic technique. Set up three targets at short, medium, and long greenside distances, and have the player hit to each using a shorter, medium, or fuller swing while keeping the same sand entry point and follow-through.

This mirrors how wedge distance control works from the fairway. If your junior is also building yardages for full wedge shots, our wedge distance control guide walks through building a yardage chart the same way, by testing real shots rather than guessing.

Greenside bunker technique and fairway bunker technique are not the same shot. A fairway bunker shot generally uses a more ball-first strike, similar to a normal iron shot but with a slightly steadier lower body, since the priority is clean contact rather than height. This should be introduced only after greenside technique is solid, since teaching both at once tends to blur the two motions together.

Buried or plugged lies, and severe uphill or downhill stances, are worth practicing occasionally but do not need heavy repeated drilling. A junior who is comfortable with the basics above can adapt to an awkward lie using the same core principles: hit sand first, commit through impact, adjust swing length for distance.

Confidence in the bunker comes from reps that feel like progress, not from a pile of shots hit with no way to measure success. A few games that work well once the basics are in place:

• Sand save streak. From five different greenside bunker lies, count how many finish within a club-length circle around a target. Track the personal best over time.
• Up-and-down contest. Hit a ball into a bunker, then play the recovery shot and putt out. Score it like a mini scramble against a personal best or a sibling.

If bunker contact stays inconsistent after a few weeks of this progression, a short lesson focused specifically on entry point and clubface angle is usually worth more than continued self-directed practice. Browse the coach directory for someone who works with junior players on short game fundamentals.