Buying Off the Rack is (still) a Guessing Game

Every year I think golf companies will get on board with how to build and market golf clubs to the average player.  But once again, the equipment companies are short-changing their customers and hurting themselves with the inconsistency in their product lines.  Now what in the world do I mean by this statement?  Let’s take a look.

Shaft Weight.  Let’s say you are looking for a new driver.  You had your eye on a Ping but maybe you would look at a new Rocketballz model. These drivers have completely different shaft weights  If you picked four manufacturers drivers this year, you could have four different shaft weights.  So if you took them to the demo bay, you would not get a fair comparison because maybe only one of those shaft weights was good for your swing.

Club Length.  Now this gets even more interesting. I just measured five different men’s drivers and they varied from as short as 44.75 inches to 47.75 inches!  This completely changes weight, balance and feel of the club.  Our philosophy is to have you play the longest, lightest most flexible shafts that you can control.  But trying to find your groove with clubs that are inconsistent in length creates a big problem.

Shaft Flex.  Once again, I took five different men’s drivers and tested their shaft stiffness.  All of the shafts were marked “S” for stiff flex.  The clubs actually tested from as soft as Senior flex to as stiff as X or Extra Stiff.  When you would test these in the demo bay, you would get totally different results depending upon which shaft was closest to your optimum flex.  You might hit the “soft” S flex well but struggle with distance and launch angle with the “extra stiff”.  The result is that you may have had your heart set on a particular club, but because of the shaft weight, length and flex, you were disappointed and bought a competing brand.

At D’Lance Golf Performance Center, we make sure that you are fit to the optimum weight, length, flex, swing weight, launch angle, and spin rates to optimize your performance.  We do that by dialing you in to a shaft that can be connected to a number of different heads and reviewing the shot results on our TrackMan launch monitor.  This takes the guesswork out of a fitting and allows you to purchase the club you had your heart set on with the shaft that makes it perform.