Too often, I’ve heard people tell me they aren’t good enough for a custom club fitting.
I call B.S.
Recently, I took my father-in-law-to-be, Sam, to a club fitting to put this myth to bed once and for all.
Sam has been a golfer off-and-on over the years, but recently decided to get a little more serious about it this year as my fiancée and I moved back to the Boston area this fall, where her parents live.
He constantly disparaged his own game to me before we even set foot on a course for the first time, but it didn’t take long for me to realize why.
Sam has only ever owned one set of golf clubs, and he was still using a set of Ping Zing irons, originally released in 1992. While the Zings were revolutionary at the time for their wild, oversized shape and extreme perimeter weighting, modern golf club technology has come a long way.
Over the summer, he started taking lessons for the first time in his life, and started seeing improvements in his ballstriking, but it was still obvious his equipment was limiting him.
He was long overdue for an upgrade, but Sam also wondered what the purpose of getting a club fitting was for a golfer who was basically a beginner. Should he continue working to train his golf swing to produce more consistent results before getting a fitting?
Fortunately, Boston has a True Spec Golf location in Waltham, Massachusetts, just about 25 minutes outside the city, so I thought it would make a nice case study to see how much a beginner could really gain from a custom fitting.
We decided to take it slow at first, just working on Sam’s irons and wedges, since he has a TaylorMade R580 driver — modern tech compared to the rest of his bag! — that he doesn’t have many issues keeping the ball in play with.
True Spec Master Fitter Brian Gulino first got Sam to warm up and get a sense for his tendencies. Sure enough, Sam was struggling with contact, but the balls he found the face with, he was hitting high, short, and out to the right. Impact locations were high and off the toe.
Brian quickly assembled a few different heads to test and began considering whether Sam should use steel or graphite shafts. It wasn’t long before he decided Sam could generate much more speed and launch with lighter-weight graphite shafts. He quickly found success with the UST Quantum speed shaft.
This was the big “Aha!” moment. Sam struggled with a couple of the other shafts and then started grooving it with the UST shaft. He asked Brian how that could happen despite his “shitty” (his words, not mine!) swing.
“That’s the craziest thing when people come in here and they think, ‘Oh, my swing sucks,'” Brian siad. “It’s not the swing that sucks. The swing is the most consistent part of your game. It’s the contact. It’s not as good.”
Sam struggles with a big slice because his swing always comes over the top (out-to-in) by about five to eight degrees. What changes is whether or not he releases the club and gets the clubface back to square.
“When you look at a golfer who’s a 20-plus handicap compared to a scratch golfer, one of the biggest things they have in common is their swing is the most consistent part, regardless of your handicap,” Brian said. ”The most inconsistent part of the 15-, 20-, 25-handicapper is gonna be the contact. So when you’re looking at someone’s swing and you look at these pros and you look at the average golfer, the biggest difference is how they actually make contact with the golf ball.”
“So getting you into something now that times up to your swing, allows you to release it, allows you to have more control over the club face, is now going to make your contact better, then you’ll start seeing your strokes drop and, you know, all better stuff in golf.”
This is why it’s so important to recognize the shaft as a timing mechanism. When you get one that times up with your unique swing, it makes it so much easier to square the club face and hit it straight.
With his previous irons, the shaft wasn’t kicking, which is why he would swing left with an open club face and slice it right. Now he gets a shaft that kicks.
The last challenge was just finding the right head for him. Brian and Sam selected TaylorMade’s Qi iron because it has a similar long blade length that Sam prefers after years of playing the Zings. He also used the same shaft, just slightly heavier in two wedges to round out the bottom of the bag.
The improvements were actually quite astonishing.
With his 6-iron, Sam picked up an astonishing 9.4 mph of ball speed. Part of that is due to a nearly 4 mph increase in clubhead speed because of the lighter shaft, but his efficiency (ball speed divided by clubhead speed) also improved from 1.30 to 1.36. We also found that jumbo-sized grips allowed Sam to feel like he’s got more control of the club, which actually loosens his grip pressure and gets him to swing faster.
His launch and spin go down, but because of the faster ball speeds, he still nearly achieves the same peak heights and Sam will gladly trade a few feet of peak height for 15 yards of carry distance. At his level, he’s not looking to throw darts at pins tucked behind bunkers. He’s just looking to get the ball to roll up onto the green.
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But what’s more important for us is the fact that Sam’s average club face angle went from 2.2 degrees open to 3.5 degrees closed. That’s enough to start the ball left and neutralize a bit of the cut spin imparted by his out-to-in path, resulting in straight shots.
“Overall, we’re lightening the shaft. The head is gonna feel a little bit lighter, and it’s gonna kick a lot easier for you,” Brian said. “So, how you actually retain club head speed now and distance is gonna be so much easier throughout the round of golf.”
Brian also fit Sam into a set of Vokey SM10 Wedges with the S-Grind to lower his strike point on the face, which helps him produce more speed and spin for not only a more controlled and longer ball flight, but a more consistent one too.
One thing Sam really struggles with is holding on to the club face and not releasing it through the swing, causing his right-to-right weak miss.
Now with a shaft that times up with him, he’s going to get a better feeling of releasing the clubhead in practice. What we saw in the fitting bay was only the start of what he might see when he begins to practice and play with these new clubs.
Of course, timing is tough with getting new clubs in New England in November, when most courses are shutting down for the winter, but Sam is excited to put these into play next spring. It’s going to make the start of next season so much more enjoyable for him and help him improve rapidly once the season begins.
Obviously, someone shouldn’t set foot in a fitting bay for their first golf experience, but once you play enough to develop some swing tendencies, a fitting can help you improve rapidly.
Ready to get the right clubs to improve your golf game? Find a club-fitting location near you at True Spec Golf.
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