This rule in a nutshell: If a trolley moves your ball or alters its lie, the Rules of Golf allow you to restore the original situation without penalty.
Is the trolley golf’s greatest invention? It’s surely up there. Full marks to whoever decided ‘I’m sick of lugging this around on my shoulder, I’ll stick it on some wheels and push it instead’.
Now, with electric trolleys and those new ones that use GPS to follow you about, a round of golf can genuinely be a pleasant stroll.
But even though companies like Navee Golf are designing super-light trolleys that barely take up any room on the golf course, they can still occasionally get some of you into a rules tangle.
That’s the subject of this week’s question: “My playing partner ran over my ball with his trolley – am I entitled to relief?”
What do you think? Is it tough luck, play it as it lies, and ask your playing partner to be more careful in future? Or are the Rules of Golf riding to the rescue? Let’s take a look…
Can I get relief if a trolley moved my ball?
You may feel the Rules of Golf can be a bit unfair at times – usually when your ball is wedged deep in the bottom of a fairway divot or you’ve found the only tree that isn’t staked.
But there are a couple here that potentially come into play to help you.
A ball is deemed to have moved if it has “left its original spot and come to rest on any other spot, and this can be seen by the naked eye”.
This definition doesn’t just mean if the ball goes forward or backwards. It applies “whether the ball has gone up, down or horizontally in any direction away from its original spot”.
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If the ball has moved, the playing partner who may been a bit careless with their trolley is an outside influence and Rule 9.6 comes into play.
That says if it’s known or virtually certain that an “outside influence (including another player in stroke play or another ball) lifted or moved a player’s ball at rest” there is no penalty and the ball must be replaced on its original spot.
You don’t even have to find the golf ball. As long as you know – or are virtually certain – that it’s been moved you can take relief. Just replace it with another ball.
What if you don’t know where it was moved from?
When this happens, you estimate. That will be enough for most of you, but there is a clarification to Rule 9.6 that takes this forward – looking at what to do when the original spot is not known.
It says players “must use their reasonable judgement to determine where the ball had come to rest before it was moved”.
So what if the lie has been altered, which is fairly likely if a trolley has steamrollered over your ball?
Rule 14.2d focuses on where to replace a ball when the original lie has been altered. If the ball is anywhere except in sand, you place it on the nearest spot “with a lie most similar to the original lie”.
That needs to be within a club-length of the original spot (estimate if not known), not nearer the hole, and in the same part of the course as that spot.
So, for example, if the trolley trampling happened within a club length of a green you couldn’t take advantage by placing the ball on the putting surface.
And “if the player knows that the original lie was altered but does not know what the lie was, the player must estimate the original lie and replace the ball.”
Got a question for our expert?
Despite the changes to the Rules of Golf in 2019 and 2023, there are still some that leave us scratching our heads. I’ll try to help by featuring the best of your queries in this column.
Can I get relief if a trolley moves my ball?: What do you think of this rule? Let me know by leaving a comment below, email me at s.carroll@nationalclubgolfer.com or get in touch on X.
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