Driver fitting
Ninety minutes, $145, one golfer in the bay. The club most people spend the most money on and the one most likely to be built for someone else's swing.
The two mistakes we see weekly
The first is length. Off-the-rack drivers have grown to around 45.5 inches because longer shafts test faster in a machine. Human beings are not machines, and a half inch of extra length that costs you the centre of the face is a bad trade every time. A large share of the golfers who sit down here leave an inch to an inch and a half shorter and hit it further, because centre contact beats theoretical clubhead speed.
The second is stiffness bought socially. A golfer plays stiff because his group plays stiff, and spends five years fighting a club that will not load. There is no prize for the letter on your shaft and nobody in your foursome will ever check.
What we work through
Loft is not a distance dial
Most amateurs are playing less loft than they should, having absorbed a decade of "low spin" talk aimed at professionals. If your drives climb and fall out of the sky, more loft with less spin loft is usually the answer, and it is counterintuitive enough that people argue with us about it until they see the pattern on the mat.
Drivers for slower swings
If your driver speed sits below about 85 miles per hour, the fitting priorities reverse. Spin becomes a friend rather than an enemy, because you need the ball to stay in the air long enough to carry. Light total weight, higher loft, and a shaft that loads easily will beat anything marketed on low spin.
This is the situation for most golfers past sixty-five and for a good number of women who have been sold a stock driver built around a 100 mph swing. It is fixable in one session and the change tends to be immediately obvious.
Adjustable hosels
Nearly every modern driver has one, and they are genuinely useful for loft and face angle within a narrow band. What they cannot change is shaft weight, shaft profile, length, or swing weight — which is to say, most of what matters. An adjustable head is a fine thing to own and a poor substitute for a fitting.
They told me my driver was already close and the real issue was the three wood I never hit. Charged me for one session, not two, and fixed the club that needed fixing.
Tomas R. — Summerville
Bring your current driver
We measure it before we change anything: actual length, actual frequency, actual swing weight, actual loft. Roughly one driver in five turns out to be materially different from what its label claims, which is worth knowing before you spend money on a replacement.
Book a driver session
Ninety minutes, $145, credited back if you build the club here within ninety days.