2 things Nelly Korda does right in the bunker that many average golfers get wrong

Watch Nelly Korda in the bunker and you’ll see a motion that you’ll want to copy. Heading into this week's major Chevron Championship, her sand save percentage in 2026 was 71 percent, ranking her third on the LPGA Tour. The No. 2 player in the world makes so many saves from the bunkers because she’s doing a few things technically that a lot of amateurs get wrong. We sent this video of Korda setting up another sand save to Golf Digest Best Teacher in Illinois, Jason Guss, to see what Korda’s doing that average players need to mimic.

Guss says that he’s seen a lot of average players take good advice in the bunker too far.

“One of those being that your feet need to be open when you’re in the sand,” Guss explains. “If you look at Nelly's setup in the sand, she's not overly open with her stance, she's not overly aiming way left. I think that's a big thing for people in bunkers. They’ve heard the advice of opening the stance, aiming left, and they’ve gone too far with it. Nelly demonstrates an appropriate amount of openness in the stance here.”

While Guss says that average players generally have their feet too open, he also says that they have the opposite problem with the clubface: Rarely does an average player open the clubface enough when they're in the sand.

“And when they don't get it open enough, the sand wedge is going to dig. It's not going to bounce through the sand,” Guss says. “When the wedge digs too quickly, it generally makes you take too much sand and the ball doesn't come out, and then people don't want to hit the sand at all.”

This leads to a string of mistakes. When average players take too much sand, Guss says that they try to then overcompensate and take no sand. That results in them hitting a screamer straight across the green. After they experience that miss, Guss says they’re scared to swing hard. Which is fair: They’ve just hit it 30 yards over the green. But when you’re in the sand, you need to swing hard because if you don’t, your club won’t get through the sand.

“If you’re scared of speed,” Guss says, “you’re just going to dig in to the sand again and leave it in the bunker.”

This brutal, demoralizing loop of mistakes can be easily fixed by opening the clubface more. This allows you to hit the sand with enough speed, behind the ball, that the ball will pop out of the bunker and land softly on the green.