How Many Drivers Should You Hit Per Round?

Count the holes on your scorecard. Four par 3s, ten par 4s, four par 5s. That’s fourteen tee shots where you could pull driver.

Most golfers pull it on all fourteen and never think about it again. A few pull it twice and spend the whole round wondering what they left out there. Neither one has actually asked the question.

So let’s answer it properly, because it’s worth about five shots a round to you — and it doesn’t cost you a single swing change.

How many drivers per round should you hit?

Fourteen tee shots on a standard par 72 give you the option. How many you should take depends on the score you actually shoot, not the score you tell people you shoot.

Notice which way that goes. The number comes down as you get better, and the reason flips completely on its way down. High handicappers should hit more drivers because their alternative is worse. Good players hit fewer because the golf course has stopped giving them anywhere to put it.

Why fourteen is the wrong goal

Here’s what almost nobody tells you: the tee shot isn’t a distance contest, it’s a position contest. The only thing that matters about your drive is what it does to the shot after it.

A 250-yard drive in the fairway on the correct side is worth more than a 285 in the right rough behind a tree. Everybody nods at that sentence and then goes to the first tee and swings out of their shoes anyway.

So stop asking “driver or not.” Start asking the only question that pays: what is the longest shot I can hit here that finishes somewhere I can play from? Sometimes the answer is a full driver. More often than you’d like, it’s the same driver hit softer.

Shooting 90 or worse? Hit more drivers — just hit them shorter

If you’re a higher handicap, I want you hitting driver on nearly every hole that allows it. You have to learn to hit that club and play with it, because the 3-wood you pull out in a panic is a club you’ve hit forty times in your life.

But here’s the trick, and it’s the whole post in one line: try to hit it shorter, not longer.

Higher handicappers don’t lose shots because the driver is too much club. They lose shots because they swing too hard with it and end up in the wrong position — the bunker, the trees, the other fairway, the road. That’s not a swing flaw. That’s a decision you made before you drew the club back.

And this is where discipline comes in, because let’s be honest with each other: as guys, we want to swing hard. It feels good. It’s the most fun thing in the sport. Nobody has ever walked off a tee box grinning about a smooth one. That urge is exactly what’s costing you four shots a round, and beating it is a skill you can practice like any other.

If this sounds familiar, it should — it’s the other half of why golfers shooting over 85 need to hit more drivers. Hit more of them. Hit them at 70%.

The 70% driver

A 70% driver is exactly what it sounds like: your driver, swung at roughly seventy percent of the speed you’re capable of, producing a ball flight you know isn’t going out of bounds.

It is not a 3-wood. It is not “clubbing down.” It’s the club you’ve hit more than any other in your bag, with the violence removed. That distinction matters, and I’ll come back to why in a minute.

What you get is a tee shot with a pattern you can predict. The distance you give up is smaller than the swing feels — a softer, more centred strike claws back a surprising amount of what the speed gave away. The dispersion you save is enormous, because most of your ugly misses live at the top end of your effort, not in the middle of it.

Build one like this:

1. Hit ten drivers at full effort on the range. Don’t judge them. Just note how wide the pattern is, left edge to right edge.
2. Hit ten more at what feels like 70%. Same club, same ball, shorter and slower backswing, finish balanced.
3. Compare the width of the two patterns, not the length. Length is the number you want to look at. Width is the number that decides your score.
4. Pick the swing whose worst shot is still playable. That’s your tee swing. Not your best shot — your worst one.
5. Rehearse it before every tee shot for a month. One practice swing at the speed you actually intend to make. Most golfers rehearse a smooth one and then hit a wild one.

You might want to swing driver fourteen times a round. Get genuinely good at a 3-iron off the tee and a 70% driver you know won’t go out of bounds, and that’s your path to shooting five shots better in the long run. Not this Saturday. Over a season.

Lower handicaps: the course sets the number, not you

Once you’re breaking 80 consistently, the honest answer to how many drivers you should hit is it depends on the course — and most courses are very playable without hitting nearly as many as you think.

The best example in the sport is still Tiger at Royal Liverpool in 2006. Hoylake was baked out and running, driver brought bunkers into play everywhere, so he hit stingers and long irons off the tee all week. He used his driver once in seventy-two holes, missed the fairway with it, and won The Open by two shots.

He wasn’t being timid. He’d worked out what the golf course was asking for and gave it exactly that, for four days, without his ego getting a vote. That is course management — Pillar 2 of the nine pillars — and it’s the pillar most good players skip because they’d rather work on their swing.

Walk your home course once with a notebook instead of a scorecard. On every par 4 and par 5, write down where the trouble actually starts and what club stops short of it. You’ll find two or three holes you’ve been hitting driver on for years for no reason at all.

If you carry it 300, the course runs out of room before you do

For genuinely long hitters this gets simple, and a little annoying. Most golf courses were not designed for you. Hit driver on a 400-yard par 4 and you’re not in a landing area — you’re in the stuff the architect put there to catch a good drive from 1985.

At that speed, scores stop coming from distance and start coming from two things: avoiding fairway bunkers and being on the correct side of the fairway. A fairway bunker at 290 is a half-shot penalty minimum, and it doesn’t care how far you carry it.

The correct side is the underrated half of that. A drive that finishes 20 yards shorter but on the side of the fairway that opens up the pin is worth more than a bomb that leaves you short-siding yourself into a back-left flag. Pick the side first, then pick the club that gets you there.

What the numbers say — and where they stop

I want to be straight with you about the other side of this argument, because the data people have a real point. Tracked-shot studies from Shot Scope and strokes-gained work popularised by Scott Fawcett both land in the same place: golfers who club down off the tee gain about fifteen percent more fairways and give up thirty to fifty yards on every approach. That is, on average, a bad trade.

They’re right, and I’m not arguing with them. Here’s the line I’d draw instead.

First, the 70% driver isn’t clubbing down — it’s the same club with a narrower pattern, so it doesn’t pay the full distance penalty their comparison assumes.

Second, averages are calm about the thing that isn’t calm: penalty strokes. Light rough costs you about a third of a shot, which is nothing. Out of bounds costs you two and a hole you’d already half-made. For a golfer shooting in the 90s, the tee shots that wreck a card aren’t slightly crooked — they’re gone.

So take their advice on the fourteen tee shots where nothing bad can happen, and take mine on the three or four where something can.

Find your own number in five rounds

Every number above is a starting point. Yours is sitting in your next five rounds, and it takes one extra column on the card to find it.

1. Drivers hit. Just the count, out of the fourteen available.
2. Drivers in play. Fairway or a lie you could hit a normal shot from. Rough you can advance the ball out of counts. Bunkers, trees and reloads don’t.
3. Tee-shot penalty strokes. Out of bounds, water, unplayable, anything you had to re-tee. This is the column that will change your mind.

After five rounds you’ll have a driver-in-play percentage and a real penalty count. If you’re under 60% in play, or averaging more than one tee-shot penalty a round, your number is too high — take a couple of drivers out and put the 70% swing in. That’s Pillar 8, Data, doing what it’s supposed to do, and it pairs with the rest of the golf scoring benchmarks you should be measuring yourself against.

Not sure how well you’re thinking your way around the course in the first place? The free course management assessment takes about sixty seconds and scores you on Pillar 2 specifically — no email required.

How many times should you hit driver in a round of golf?

A standard par 72 gives you 14 tee shots where driver is an option — 10 par 4s and 4 par 5s. If you shoot 90 or worse, hit it on 12 to 14 of them, but at about 70% effort. In the 80s, 11 to 13. In the 70s, 9 to 12 and let the course decide. If you carry it 300 or better, 6 to 10, because most courses simply run out of room. The number goes down as you get better, and the reason changes: high handicappers hit more drivers because their alternative club is worse, and good players hit fewer because they’ve run out of fairway.

Should high handicappers hit driver?

Yes — more often than most of them do. The shots a high handicapper loses off the tee are almost never caused by the club being too much; they’re caused by swinging too hard with it. Dropping to a 3-wood you rarely practice usually swaps a 20-yard gain for a club you trust less. The better fix is to keep the driver and take 30% off the swing until you have a tee shot you know will stay in play.

Is it better to hit 3-wood off the tee than driver?

Usually not, and the tracked-shot data backs that up: clubbing down buys a modest gain in fairways hit and costs 30 to 50 yards on every single approach, which is a bad trade for most amateurs. The exception is a hole where a full driver brings out of bounds or a forced carry into play, because averages don’t capture penalty strokes well. In that case the answer is rarely the 3-wood either — it’s a shorter swing with the driver you’ve actually practiced.

How many strokes can course management save you?

Roughly two to five shots a round for most amateurs, and none of it requires a swing change. The biggest single lever is the tee shot, because a ball in a fairway bunker, out of bounds or on the wrong side of the fairway compromises every shot that follows it. Fix your driver number and the side of the fairway you aim at, and the rest of your card improves without you doing anything different with your hands.

Fourteen chances. That’s all the golf course is offering you. Take the ones you can control, take 30% off the ones you can’t, and go find out what you shoot when the big miss stops showing up. It’s a better score than the one you’ve been swinging for.