Someone has told you to keep your head down. They meant well — and that advice is part of why you're still topping it.
Here's the mechanical truth. Every swing has a low point, the spot where the clubhead bottoms out. To strike the ball cleanly, that low point has to reach down to the ball. When you top one, the arc bottomed out above the ball's equator — the club was simply too high when it arrived.
And the reason it was too high is almost never your eyes. It's your posture. You set up with a forward tilt from the hips. Somewhere in the downswing, you stand up out of that tilt — the hips push toward the ball, the chest rises, and the entire arc rises with it. Your arms haven't changed length. Your spine just took the club away from the ball.
Staring harder at the ball can't fix that, because your head was never the thing moving first. It was along for the ride.
Keep the tilt, find the ball
What matters is whether the forward bend you set at address is still there at impact — coaches call losing it early extension. CoachVision picks this up from a single down-the-line phone clip, comparing your tilt at the strike to your tilt at setup, so you can stop guessing which cue you actually need.
The fix is the Wall Drill, and it needs no ball — which is exactly why it works.
Set up with your trail hip lightly touching a wall, or the back of a chair. Take slow, smooth practice swings, keeping that light contact all the way into the downswing. If your hips thrust toward the ball — the stand-up move — you'll feel the contact vanish immediately. The wall gives you feedback in real time that a topped shot only gives you after the fact.
Do 10 slow reps, no ball. Slow matters: at full speed the old pattern runs on autopilot, but at rehearsal speed you can feel the moment your hips want to leave the wall and choose differently.
Then hit a few balls with one thought: stay in your tilt until the ball is gone. Not head down — chest bowing to the ball through the strike.
Topping feels like the most public miss in golf, but it's among the most fixable — a single posture habit, not a broken swing. Ten slow reps against a wall tonight is a genuinely realistic path to clean contact this weekend.