Stand on any range on a Saturday morning and you'll hear it — the click of a ball starting left, climbing, then peeling hard right into the next fairway over. If that shot is yours, you've probably tried aiming further left. And you've probably noticed the ball slices more when you do.
That's the clue worth keeping. A slice isn't an aiming problem, and it isn't a grip-it-tighter problem. It's a path problem with a face problem stacked on top.
What a slice actually is
Two things happen at once. The club approaches the ball from outside the target line and cuts across it — out-to-in. And the clubface points right of that path at impact. The path starts the ball left; the open face curves it right. That's the banana.
The useful question is why the club swings out-to-in in the first place. It almost always starts at the top, with the coil.
When your shoulders and hips turn back together as one block, nothing gets stretched between them. In a loaded backswing, the shoulders turn roughly twice as far as the hips, and your midsection winds up like a spring. That stretch is what starts the downswing from the ground up.
Without it, the downswing still has to start somewhere — so the shoulders volunteer. They spin out toward the ball, the arms get thrown up and over the ideal line, and from there the only way to reach the ball is to cut across it. The slice is the last domino, not the first.
The number underneath it
Coaches call the gap between shoulder turn and hip turn the X-factor. Bigger gap, more coil — and less reason for the shoulders to lunge from the top. That gap is one of the numbers CoachVision reads off a regular phone clip, so you can see whether you're truly coiling or just rotating everything in one piece.
The drill — Headcover Gate
Grab a headcover. A rolled-up towel works too.
Place it just outside your target line, about a clubhead's width beyond the ball — on the far side, exactly where an over-the-top downswing would crash into it. Set up as normal. Your one job: swing and miss the headcover on the way down.
Start at half speed. To miss the gate, the club has to drop to the inside and approach the ball on a shallower angle — the precise move a slicer's swing has never made. Hit 10 balls. Expect to clip the gate a few times early; that's the old path showing itself, which is useful to see. Once you can miss it five swings running, add speed.
The first ball that starts right of your target and draws back toward it will feel like someone else hit it. That feeling is your new path. Spend the rest of the bucket getting acquainted.