BucketGolf Is More Like Real Golf Than I Expected

I like yard games. We play bocce, croquet, cornhole, BucketBall and whatever else the kids are into at the time. I usually don’t expect much more from them than something fun for the family to do outside.

BucketGolf surprised me because there’s more golf skill involved than I expected. It’s certainly not a replacement for short-game practice but if you have a chipping problem on the golf course, there’s a decent chance BucketGolf is going to expose it. More on that in a minute.

A few years ago, I bought my kids an Amazon knockoff version of BucketGolf. It had six holes, a few random plastic balls and no clubs. I wanted them to have something golf related to use in the yard and it was fine but they got over it relatively quickly.

The real version is better

I’ve felt the same way about products like the Divot Board, impact bags and certain other training aids. The knockoff can give you the general idea but the details are what make the original work.

The BucketGolf course comes with the buckets, flagsticks, balls, tee boxes, scorecards and a carrying bag. There are also packages with clubs and BucketGolf offers adult and kids sizes with right- and left-handed options.

We used the BucketGolf clubs (but you can use your own wedges). The game is easy enough for kids and non golfers to jump into. The clubheads are oversized and the lightweight plastic ball is surprisingly fun to hit. You can change the trajectory, curve it and put quite a bit of spin on it. The ball also tends to stop relatively close to where it lands.

There’s more strategy than I expected

Every BucketGolf hole is a par-3 and you design the course yourself. The goal is to hit the bucket but if you get the ball inside the bucket, you subtract a stroke from your score.

We played holes of different lengths and changed the setup every time. My son has an engineer’s mind and his favorite part may be course design. He creates holes that are nearly impossible, usually with obstacles directly in front of the bucket or ridiculous locations that the rest of us roll our eyes at.

That’s part of the fun.

Once you start putting trees, chairs, bushes or whatever else you have in the yard between you and the bucket, you have to figure out how to hit different shots. You can go high, keep it low, curve it around something or pick a different landing spot.

Then someone chunked one

This was the part that sold my golf instructor’s brain on the BucketGolf product.

We had some family over and one golfer playing with us has always struggled with greenside chips. His common miss is hitting behind the ball and chunking it.

Before his first shot, he looked at me and asked, “What do you do? Is it just like regular golf?”

I told him yes and you can probably picture what happened next. He chunked it.

That’s when it clicked for me that BucketGolf represents at least some real golf skill. The club is bigger, the ball is bigger and the target is much bigger but you still have to make good contact to get the ball in the air and send it where you want it. You still have to control where the club hits the ground and have some feel for distance and trajectory.

It’s not practice but it’s not nothing, either

I’m not suggesting you skip the practice green and start working on your short game with BucketGolf. A bucket of golf balls and your wedge are obviously going to do more for your short game.

But I’m a big believer that more exposure to golf helps, especially with kids. They start learning what happens when they change the face. They see how trajectory changes. They figure out that hitting behind the ball doesn’t work particularly well and they start experimenting with different shots.

There’s something useful about getting to the point where golf becomes less about worrying over positions and more about having a club, a ball and a target and figuring out how to make the ball do what you want.

The bottom line

BucketGolf is still a yard game first and that’s why I’d buy it. It gets kids excited about golf, adults can be competitive with it and there’s enough real shotmaking involved that golfers won’t get bored after five minutes.

After we played, I went straight to the BucketGolf website to see what else they make. The quality is there, the game is well thought out and, unlike the cheaper version we bought a few years ago, my kids keep wanting to play it.

If you have kids or grandkids and want another game for the yard, this is an easy one for me to recommend.

Just know that making the golf ball bigger apparently doesn’t make the chunk disappear.