Six beginner habits that lose golf balls, and the snakes, crocs and tea-tree waiting off the fairway

Spring is when a lot of Australians play their first proper rounds. The lessons are done, the half set is in the boot, and the club has a Saturday stableford or a twilight nine with a spare spot. Then the round starts and the balls start vanishing: one into the dam on the 3rd, one into the scrub on the 7th, one that looked perfectly safe and was never seen again. By the 18th the sleeve you bought on the way in is gone and the borrowed balls have run out too. Very little of that is about technique. New golfers lose balls because of a handful of habits, and every one of them can be fixed before your next hit-off with the swing you already own. Here are the six that empty a beginner’s bag fastest, the rules that make each one cheaper, and the hazards Australian courses add at this time of year, from snakes and swooping birds to tea-tree, tropical lakes and no play zones.

The real bill for a missing ball

A poor shot that stays in play costs you one stroke. A ball that disappears costs you far more. Under stroke and distance (Rule 18.1) a lost ball or a ball out of bounds means a penalty stroke and a trip back to where you last played, so the tee shot you hit into the bush turns into your third shot from the tee. Add the time spent searching and the group behind waiting on the tee, and a single lost ball can ruin a hole, a round and a good mood.

That is the reason to treat lost balls as their own problem rather than a side effect of a bad swing. The holes that blow out a beginner’s card are nearly always the holes where a ball went missing. Cut the number of balls you lose and the score usually follows without a single lesson.

Habit one: hitting before you know what you are aiming at

Most beginners stand on the tee, look at the flag or the middle of the fairway and swing. Nobody has looked at where the trouble is. Before you tee up, spend five seconds reading the hole: where is the water, which side has the out of bounds fence, where does the scrub start? Then choose the side of the hole that gives your usual miss some room.

If your shots tend to curve right, aim down the left half and let the ball drift back. If there is a boundary down one side and open rough down the other, favour the open side even if it leaves a longer shot in. Rough costs you a little distance. A fence costs you a ball and two shots. Our guide to hitting more fairways goes further into picking a target line that suits the shot you actually have.

Habit two: reaching for the driver because it is a tee

The driver is the club beginners hit furthest and least straight. On a wide par 5 with nothing nasty either side, it is a fine choice. On a narrow par 4 with a dam on the left and the boundary on the right, the extra distance it gives you is worth far less than the ball it is likely to cost.

A simple test helps: if the trouble on the hole sits inside the spread of your normal misses, leave the driver in the bag. Tee off with whatever you hit most reliably, whether that is a hybrid, a fairway wood or a 7-iron. You will be 30 or 40 metres further back, but you will be playing your second shot from short grass with the same ball. If the course has several sets of tees, moving forward makes a big difference too, because forced carries over water get much shorter. Our article on choosing which tees to play explains how to pick the right markers for your game.

Habit three: losing sight of the ball after impact

Ask a beginner where the ball went and the answer is often a wave of the hand towards the rough. They lifted their head early, lost the ball against the sky, and walked off with a rough idea instead of a spot. Three minutes of searching later (that is all Rule 18.2a allows), the ball is lost.

Keep your eyes on the ball until it stops, then tie the spot to something you will still recognise from 150 metres closer: a gum with a broken limb, the right lip of a bunker, a distance marker, a gap in a fence line. “Somewhere near the trees” is not a spot. “Level with the dead branch, two metres into the long stuff” is.

Turn this into a group rule. Everyone watches every tee shot, and the player says out loud where it finished. Four sets of eyes find balls that one set misses, and it costs nothing. In a twilight comp, when the light starts to drop behind the tree line, this matters even more.

Habit four: going for the gap in the scrub

Your ball is behind a tree or deep in the tea-tree and there is a narrow opening towards the green. You might fit it through once in ten attempts. The other nine times the ball clips a branch and drops further into the scrub, or rattles across into the out of bounds on the other side.

The cheaper option nearly always runs sideways: a low, short punch back to the fairway with a mid iron, using the widest exit you can see. It feels like giving away a shot. In practice it saves shots, because the brave option so often means two or three more hacks from the same bush, and it keeps the ball in your bag.

Sometimes there is no shot at all. If the ball is wedged in a shrub or under roots, you can declare it unplayable (Rule 19) for one penalty stroke and drop rather than swinging and hoping. And in a stableford comp, remember that once you can no longer score a point on a hole, you can pick up and move on. Hitting a fourth and fifth ball into the same bushland gains you nothing on the card.

Habit five: reloading at the dam

The ball splashes down in the dam in front of the tee. The beginner pulls out a second ball, makes the same swing, and watches it go in too. It is one of the most familiar scenes on any Australian course, and you do not have to repeat it.

Dams, lakes and creeks are normally marked as penalty areas, with red or yellow stakes or lines (Rule 17). When you know or are virtually certain your ball is in one, replaying from the tee is only one option. For one penalty stroke you can also drop back on a line from the flag through the point where your ball last crossed the edge of the penalty area, going back as far as you like. If the area is marked red, you also have lateral relief: a drop within two club-lengths of where the ball crossed the edge, not nearer the hole. Either way the water is now behind you, and you are hitting a shorter shot with no carry. Our guide to your options at a penalty area walks through each one with examples.

One more habit for the water holes: tee up an older ball. You are free to change balls between holes, so keep two or three scuffed or recovered balls in a side pocket for the dam holes and save the good ones for the dry ones. Our article on used and lake balls looks at which ones still play well enough for that job.

Habit six: walking off without a provisional, and playing a ball nobody marked

Your drive heads towards the trees. It might be fine, so you walk the 200 metres, look for three minutes and come up empty. Now stroke and distance sends you all the way back to the tee. Most beginners will not make that walk with a group waiting behind, so they drop somewhere roughly sensible, write down a number and keep going.

The provisional ball (Rule 18.3) fixes this. If your ball might be lost outside a penalty area or might be out of bounds, you may play another ball from the same spot before you walk forward. You have to announce it clearly first, using the word “provisional”: “I’ll hit another one” does not count, and without the announcement the second ball becomes your ball in play. If you find the original within three minutes, you play it and pick up the provisional. If you do not, the provisional is in play with the same penalty you would have had anyway, and nobody has walked back.

Some Australian clubs also use Model Local Rule E-5, the alternative to stroke and distance. For two penalty strokes you drop in a relief area near where the ball was lost or went out of bounds, rather than going back. It only applies when the club has adopted it, it is usually kept for social golf and ordinary club comps rather than championships or major events, and it is not available once you have hit a provisional. The scorecard or the local rules board in the pro shop will tell you. For other rules beginners often get backwards, see our guide to the rules of golf you probably get wrong.

The second half of this habit is about the ball itself. You find a ball exactly where yours should be, same brand, same number as your playing partner’s. Under Rule 7.2, if you cannot identify it as yours, you cannot play it as yours, and if nobody can identify it within the three minutes it counts as lost. Play the wrong ball and it is a two-stroke penalty in stroke play (Rule 6.3c). The Rules recommend, without requiring it, that you put your own mark on your ball (Rule 6.3a). A permanent marker, two dots or your initials in the same spot every time, and a word on the first tee about what you are playing will settle the argument before it starts.

Where Australian beginners lose balls this spring

The six habits are the same everywhere. What changes in Australia is what waits off the fairway, and spring adds a few seasonal extras.

• Snakes in the long grass. Snakes become active again as the weather warms from September and October. Australian Golf Digest has reported a tiger snake in a bunker at Lost Farm, Barnbougle, in Tasmania, and a golfer in Western Australia bitten by a dugite while looking for his ball in the rough. Its advice is to be extra careful when searching in long grass or bushland, where snakes often rest at the edges, and to carry a compression bandage in the bag. If a venomous snake is near your ball, Rule 16.2 treats it as a dangerous animal condition and gives you free relief wherever the ball lies; inside a penalty area, that free relief has to be taken inside the penalty area. No ball is worth reaching into a tussock for.
• Crocodiles in the tropics. In far north Queensland, the lakes on some courses are not just penalty areas. At Palmer Sea Reef in Port Douglas, a golfer was bitten on the leg by a saltwater crocodile of about 1.2 metres in 2015 after hitting his ball into the water on the 11th and driving down to retrieve it, and in May 2025 a croc of about 3 metres was filmed walking across the 10th fairway. The course has warning signs telling golfers to keep away from the water. Take your penalty drop and leave the ball where it is.
• Heath and tea-tree on the Sandbelt. On Melbourne’s Sandbelt courses and other heathland layouts, the ground off the short grass is native heath, with tea-tree (Leptospermum and Melaleuca) often close to the fairways. A ball that runs into it may be found and still be unplayable. Watch it in, decide quickly whether a punch out is possible, and take an unplayable drop if it is not.
• No play zones and green-topped stakes. Many Australian clubs protect revegetation and environmentally sensitive areas with stakes topped in green. What they mean depends on the colour underneath. At Marrickville Golf Club in Sydney’s inner west, for example, the local rules mark no play zones inside red penalty areas on the 9th and 17th, where relief must be taken with a penalty, and a no play zone with white stakes topped in green on the 18th, where relief is free. The same rules define the Cooks River by its steel retaining wall as out of bounds. You may not play from a no play zone, so do not wander in after your ball.
• Swooping birds. Spring is breeding season. The Queensland Government lists magpies, magpie-larks, masked lapwings (plovers) and several other birds as swoopers, with magpies swooping from August to November to protect eggs and young. Lapwings nest on open ground, so an unlucky shot can land near a nest on a quiet corner of the course. Do not hang around searching in a swooping zone: play a provisional, or take the penalty and move on.
• Grass waking up. Couch and kikuyu are warm-season grasses that come out of their winter slowdown as the soil warms. Over spring the rough can thicken quickly from one week to the next, so a ball that sat up in July may nestle down in October. A yellow or orange ball is easier to spot in it, and watching every ball to the ground matters more than ever.

If you are still learning, choose ground that gives balls fewer places to hide. Golf Australia’s Get Into Golf program runs small-group beginner sessions, typically weekly and lasting about 45 to 60 minutes, at clubs and venues around the country, and you can search for one by postcode on its website. Some venues use par 3 courses for part of the program. A short course or a nine-hole layout is the kindest place to practise these habits before you take them to a full 18, and our guide to nine-hole courses explains what to look for.

Before your next hit-off

• Mark every ball in the bag with the same symbol, and tell your group what you are playing.
• Keep two or three older balls in a side pocket for the holes with water.
• Read the local rules on the scorecard: penalty areas, green-topped stakes, out of bounds, and whether E-5 is in effect for your comp.
• Pack a compression bandage, a hat and water, and leave the searching in long grass to the edges you can see clearly.
• Before each tee shot, find the trouble and aim to the side that leaves your usual miss some room.
• On tight holes, hit the club you trust most, not the longest one.
• Watch every shot until it stops and name a landmark out loud.
• If a ball might be lost or out of bounds, say “provisional” and hit another before you walk.
• From scrub, punch back to the fairway. From the dam, take your drop. Near a croc, snake or swooping bird, leave the ball.

Count the balls in your bag on the first tee and again in the car park afterwards. For a beginner, that difference is a more honest measure of progress than the score, and it is the one you can improve this weekend.