arydolphin
GTHC!
A new location of Club Champion opened a couple of months ago in the Boston area. They ran a "grand opening" special through Father's Day that fittings could be purchased for half off. After some subtle hints on my part, my wife came through with an awesome Father's Day gift for me: a full bag fitting at that facility. So after chatting with the guys over at Club Champion, I made my appointment for my fitting a couple of weeks ago.
First of all, a little about my game: I finally became a single digit handicap last year. However, since my son was born last fall, my opportunities to play have dropped off, I probably have 1 day a week now to play or practice. Stock shot is a draw, play my 8 iron as my 150 yard club. Good carry distance with my driver would be somewhere around 240. I can hit the ball fairly high with most of my clubs, but would not call myself a high spin player. Putting and short game is the strength of my game, and I feel that my driving is the worst part of my game. I had not had a fitting since 2011, but was lucky to get new gear via participating in the Morgan Cup in the past 3 years. To be honest, I had used a lot of educated guessing in the past 2 years to pick the gear that I was playing. Goal of my fitting: figure out whether my driver and other long clubs were good fits for me, and try to figure out if I could play some slightly more forgiving irons because I'm not playing as much as in the past.
I walked into the facility and was greeted by Ted, who is one of the 2 main fitters there. I recognized him because he used to work at the Golfsmith near me. Anyways, we talked a little about my game, and he knew of the Morgan Cup and THP which was cool. He told me that most people split their full bag fitting into 2 days, but I told him that I wanted to do everything in one day. Coming off of a night where I got about 3 hours of sleep, this would prove to be a bad decision.
We started off with my irons because I feel most comfortable with those clubs right now. The setup is indoors, so you're hitting balls into a screen off of a really good quality mat, with a Trackman set up to record every shot. The Trackman is a big part of the fitting, because they really focus on the smash factor of each club. Smash factor is ball speed divided by club head speed, and is a measure of energy transfer from the club to the ball. Their focus is on fitting for shaft first, and they want to get you into the iron shaft that gives you the highest average smash factor, and then find a head that will pair well with the shaft. The setup at Club Champion is unlike any fitting center I've ever been to: they have basically every iron head that you would want to hit, and every iron shaft that you would want to hit, and they mix and match them. The same setup is present for woods and hybrids. It's pretty cool because you're not at the mercy of what is provided on a fitting cart by each OEM.
After hitting a few shots with my gamer 6 iron (Bridgestone DPC with PXi 6.0 softstepped), Ted had the baseline data that we would work off of. He picked a head that he thought was close to my current club (in this case, Taylormade TP CB) and then we started testing shafts. My smash factor was pretty good with my gamer, usually between 1.38-1.40. I tried a few different steel shafts and couldn't get a smash factor that high, which included KBS Tour V and DG Pro. There were a couple of other iron shafts that I honestly can't remember, and then we moved to the Aerotech Steelfiber i95 in stiff flex, which gave me a smash factor even higher than my gamer. I loved the "pop" that the shaft gave me, and the balance of the shaft was really good as well. After that, we ran through a bunch of different iron heads: Callaway Apex, Titleist AP2, Mizuno JPX EZ Forged, Nike Covert Forged, Taylormade SLDR, Cobra Bio Cell+, Cleveland 588 TT, Ping i25. The top 3 clubs I hit on this day with the Steelfiber shaft were the SLDR, Covert Forged and i25. I hit the longest shots with the Covert Forged, but also hit some stinkers. The i25 was a pretty good club, but the overall distance and dispersion of the SLDR won out. I wanted to like the Apex, but the balance just wasn't right. Cool part of the iron fitting: when I was hitting shots with the SLDR, they were going a bit further left than I liked. Ted got out out a lie board and figured out the club was too upright for me. He took the club, went over to a Mitchell machine, bent the club a degree flat, then handed it back to me. After that: boom, straighter shots! It was awesome that we could make that switch so quickly.
After that, we went to the wedge fitting, which was honestly a bit disappointing. They only had a few wedges sitting in a staff bag in the corner of the facility. There was no ability to swap out shafts either, and a limited amount of lofts in each wedge. Out of the wedges available, I liked the Titleist SM5 the best, but that was mainly because of the shape of the wedge since they only had 56 and 60 degree wedges in that club and I don't play either of those lofts. Plus, a wedge fitting indoors is basically limited to full shots anyways. It was the low point of the fitting, but not the fitter's fault at all.
Next up, we went to the putting section. They have a SAM putting lab setup, where a sensor is hooked up to the shaft of your current putter. You hit 7 putts from about 8-10 feet away from the hole, and then it spits out a ton of data on your putting stroke, tempo, where the contact occurs on the face, and other stuff that honestly I didn't understand. So I get up there and make all 7 putts with my Bettinardi BB54, which is a high MOI putter. Ted was really surprised when the data was spit out and it said that I had a good bit of rotation in my stroke and I would be better with a putter that had a good bit of toe hang in it (think Anser style). We did try out a Bettinardi BB1F which felt nice, but I just wasn't confident with it. The most important thing is that the sensor spit out that at impact, I only have 2 degrees of actual loft on my putter and it needed to be about a degree more. So Ted took my putter and bent it a bit to increase the loft. We made the choice not to consider changing my putter since I was comfortable with it.
We went back into the hitting bay to start the long game fitting, but after about 15 minutes, it was clear that I was making terrible swings and not finding the center of the clubface at all. What's worse is that my swing speed numbers were around 96-99 mph, which shocked me because I was clocked around 102-104 mph in 2012 and 2013. So of course, I tried to start swinging harder and that made my numbers even worse. We decided at that point to split the fitting into 2 sessions, so I booked the second session for this past Monday. Part 2 to come.....
First of all, a little about my game: I finally became a single digit handicap last year. However, since my son was born last fall, my opportunities to play have dropped off, I probably have 1 day a week now to play or practice. Stock shot is a draw, play my 8 iron as my 150 yard club. Good carry distance with my driver would be somewhere around 240. I can hit the ball fairly high with most of my clubs, but would not call myself a high spin player. Putting and short game is the strength of my game, and I feel that my driving is the worst part of my game. I had not had a fitting since 2011, but was lucky to get new gear via participating in the Morgan Cup in the past 3 years. To be honest, I had used a lot of educated guessing in the past 2 years to pick the gear that I was playing. Goal of my fitting: figure out whether my driver and other long clubs were good fits for me, and try to figure out if I could play some slightly more forgiving irons because I'm not playing as much as in the past.
I walked into the facility and was greeted by Ted, who is one of the 2 main fitters there. I recognized him because he used to work at the Golfsmith near me. Anyways, we talked a little about my game, and he knew of the Morgan Cup and THP which was cool. He told me that most people split their full bag fitting into 2 days, but I told him that I wanted to do everything in one day. Coming off of a night where I got about 3 hours of sleep, this would prove to be a bad decision.
We started off with my irons because I feel most comfortable with those clubs right now. The setup is indoors, so you're hitting balls into a screen off of a really good quality mat, with a Trackman set up to record every shot. The Trackman is a big part of the fitting, because they really focus on the smash factor of each club. Smash factor is ball speed divided by club head speed, and is a measure of energy transfer from the club to the ball. Their focus is on fitting for shaft first, and they want to get you into the iron shaft that gives you the highest average smash factor, and then find a head that will pair well with the shaft. The setup at Club Champion is unlike any fitting center I've ever been to: they have basically every iron head that you would want to hit, and every iron shaft that you would want to hit, and they mix and match them. The same setup is present for woods and hybrids. It's pretty cool because you're not at the mercy of what is provided on a fitting cart by each OEM.
After hitting a few shots with my gamer 6 iron (Bridgestone DPC with PXi 6.0 softstepped), Ted had the baseline data that we would work off of. He picked a head that he thought was close to my current club (in this case, Taylormade TP CB) and then we started testing shafts. My smash factor was pretty good with my gamer, usually between 1.38-1.40. I tried a few different steel shafts and couldn't get a smash factor that high, which included KBS Tour V and DG Pro. There were a couple of other iron shafts that I honestly can't remember, and then we moved to the Aerotech Steelfiber i95 in stiff flex, which gave me a smash factor even higher than my gamer. I loved the "pop" that the shaft gave me, and the balance of the shaft was really good as well. After that, we ran through a bunch of different iron heads: Callaway Apex, Titleist AP2, Mizuno JPX EZ Forged, Nike Covert Forged, Taylormade SLDR, Cobra Bio Cell+, Cleveland 588 TT, Ping i25. The top 3 clubs I hit on this day with the Steelfiber shaft were the SLDR, Covert Forged and i25. I hit the longest shots with the Covert Forged, but also hit some stinkers. The i25 was a pretty good club, but the overall distance and dispersion of the SLDR won out. I wanted to like the Apex, but the balance just wasn't right. Cool part of the iron fitting: when I was hitting shots with the SLDR, they were going a bit further left than I liked. Ted got out out a lie board and figured out the club was too upright for me. He took the club, went over to a Mitchell machine, bent the club a degree flat, then handed it back to me. After that: boom, straighter shots! It was awesome that we could make that switch so quickly.
After that, we went to the wedge fitting, which was honestly a bit disappointing. They only had a few wedges sitting in a staff bag in the corner of the facility. There was no ability to swap out shafts either, and a limited amount of lofts in each wedge. Out of the wedges available, I liked the Titleist SM5 the best, but that was mainly because of the shape of the wedge since they only had 56 and 60 degree wedges in that club and I don't play either of those lofts. Plus, a wedge fitting indoors is basically limited to full shots anyways. It was the low point of the fitting, but not the fitter's fault at all.
Next up, we went to the putting section. They have a SAM putting lab setup, where a sensor is hooked up to the shaft of your current putter. You hit 7 putts from about 8-10 feet away from the hole, and then it spits out a ton of data on your putting stroke, tempo, where the contact occurs on the face, and other stuff that honestly I didn't understand. So I get up there and make all 7 putts with my Bettinardi BB54, which is a high MOI putter. Ted was really surprised when the data was spit out and it said that I had a good bit of rotation in my stroke and I would be better with a putter that had a good bit of toe hang in it (think Anser style). We did try out a Bettinardi BB1F which felt nice, but I just wasn't confident with it. The most important thing is that the sensor spit out that at impact, I only have 2 degrees of actual loft on my putter and it needed to be about a degree more. So Ted took my putter and bent it a bit to increase the loft. We made the choice not to consider changing my putter since I was comfortable with it.
We went back into the hitting bay to start the long game fitting, but after about 15 minutes, it was clear that I was making terrible swings and not finding the center of the clubface at all. What's worse is that my swing speed numbers were around 96-99 mph, which shocked me because I was clocked around 102-104 mph in 2012 and 2013. So of course, I tried to start swinging harder and that made my numbers even worse. We decided at that point to split the fitting into 2 sessions, so I booked the second session for this past Monday. Part 2 to come.....
