The guys from Ping. They've kind of showed me how much the equipment matters. I just love that I can hit any shot I kind of want.
We're gonna be able to tell some fun stories about what goes on here to help golfers play better golf.
Welcome back to the Ping Proving Grounds Podcast. I'm Shane Bacon, That's Marty Jertsen, and we have a special guest this Marty. We don't get special guests on the Zoom much. This is very exciting for us.
Yeah, this is a fun day. This is an exciting day.
Shane rose Fielder, the PING director of Engineering Operations, joins us and Rose. We're having you on for a multitude of reasons. One is I just am interested in your story. Two is we're going to talk about ladies to product development on this episode and the difference in how you go about building golf clubs for males versus females. But I wanted to start really kind of with your story and your journey because it's a very interesting one. First off,
I was reading a little bit about you. You've had no other job. You've been at PING your entire career. Is that right?
Yes, Yeah, it's something I'm proud of. But yeah, I interned for two summers at Ping before being hired full time. I've never had any motivation to go anywhere else. It's a great place to work.
So did you go straight Michigan to Arizona? Was that kind of the process for you? Yeah?
Yeah, I grew up in Michigan. I was there for what was it twenty two years or so, and then I headed out here right after graduation. So I've been here about fifteen years now.
So yeah, we won't talk about the heat right now. We'll just focus on this right now. I know it's been a little yeah, seven.
Go ahead, seventeen summers. I was going to say seventeen summers, so not just fifteen years.
It's like a badge of honor. That's like hunger game level stuff. If you spend that many times in Phoenix summers. I've dealt with it before. I don't deal with it now. I was interested in this because I was reading a
bit about you. There's a great article on golf dot com that Jessica Marksbury wrote about you when she was doing a bit of deep diving into some of the females that work in golf in a lot of different areas, and something that was interested about you is not just what you do, but how few females are involved in your space, kind of in the engineering world. So how did you get interested in that in that specific part of golf, considering you were playing collegiate golf at Michigan.
Yeah, that's a great question. So when I was in I think it was in high school, I took a physics class, just a basic physics class, and my professor instructor at the time, he asked me, he said, Hey, would you be interested in engineering? And I was like, what's that? I don't even know. So I pursued engineering kind of just knowing that I really liked math and physics and I didn't really like English as much, so it was a way to kind of avoid that a
bit too, and it worked out great. So I majored in mechanical engineering at University of Michigan and worked with a professor there one semester on a project and he happened to be working with Ping at the time, and so that was kind of my way into paying for an internship.
We've talked to Marty about getting involved in this space before. Did you have like an aha moment where you were diving into it. In college, you were kind of learning a little bit about the engineering side of things, and you went, oh, wow, this is maybe something I might want to pursue. Yeah.
I mean, so, I obviously loved golf. I played for a couple of years in college, and I never honestly considered the pairing of golf and engineering. I just kind of pursued each of them in parallel. And then, like I said, that professor that I worked with was pretty critical and helping me connect those dots to be like, oh, actually I could pair these two and that might be a fun career that I could be passionate about for the long term.
So, and do you have a message that you would send out to young women out there that might not quite know what they want to do, but understand that this is maybe an area in the sport, or in golf or in golf manufacturing that if you are a female that gets involved in it, I mean, you know, it's it might be a small group of you guys that do this, but I mean it can be something that leads to seventeen eighteen twenty years of an amazing job.
Yeah, my best advice would be to just explore that's
what I did through an internship. I've actually it's been exciting to see over the past several years since I've been here, how we've changed one of my responsibilities overseeing the internship program with an engineering and so I've seen a lot of the just I have hundreds of conversations with prospective interns over the course of a year as we're looking to hire for the next summer, and the ones that reach out and are proactive with answering, getting
questions answered, just not being afraid to say, Hey, what's it like. Can I have a phone call with you for thirty minutes and try to understand what your job looks like to see if I might like it. So that's one thing. Then obviously, if you can secure an internship or get some hands on experience, that's huge. But I didn't know that I would end up loving my career when I was a freshman, you know, and then
graduating signing up for a full time role here. I kind of I knew enough to know that I might be in it for the long run, but I kind of lucked out in many ways too, Marty.
I want to kind of turn the conversation to the idea of developing golf clubs for women, because it's something that Ping has been extremely passionate about and it's a huge part of what you guys push these days. How different is it developing golf clubs at Ping for women versus developing golf clubs for men?
Yeah, Shane, I love this topic. It kind of reminds me a little bit of the podcast we did. Folks out there haven't listened to it on the junior product because it's very similar in terms of we want to define our customer and understand and have a lot of empathy and put ourselves in the shoes of the customer we're designing for. So with our clubs for women, that's kind of what we like to say is we don't
design women's clubs, We design clubs for women. So with the clubs for women and good examples are gl three product that we just launched, we want to understand and we use the same engineering and technical horse power that we put into all of our product, our mainline product,
our junior product. What are the problems we're trying to solve for that customer, For the ladies that are playing golf and a lot of times our priorities are a little bit different, and then what tools we use to optimize their product in the end solution of that can end up being a little bit different. So some example, some practical example, Shane, would be things like the weight. That's a really big deal. We know that the headway to the driver, the total mass that you make the club.
The optimization there needs to be different. Now we're using the same horse power, we're using our same modeling techniques, we're using data analysis, we're data mining, we're using our ladies who work here on campus, or we're bringing in and Rose has really helped with this, bringing in ladies from local country clubs and women's legs around the valley.
We bring them in test on campus to understand how are they delivering the club, what are their missus, what's important to them, what are they experiencing on the golf course. And then the end solution looks a lot different than our mainline product. It looks like higher lofts, lighter weights, the gapping is a little bit different. We make higher lofted hybrids and things of that nature. We put a
different priority even on the putters. For example, in our new Jelly three line, all the putters very easily pick the ball up off the green, and two of them you can actually kind of have that fetch technology. We brought that into the new Catch putter where you can fetch it off the green. So a lot of the all the same engineering horsepower, but totally different end product solution that you see with our product there.
Rose. I feel like when people think about product development, especially in the golf club business at golf club Space, they think of professional golfers. You know, it's almost like
we work off the best in the world. And I find it interesting to think about you going out to country clubs and you know, finding a middling handicap golfer or an older golfer that's a little bit more of what the average player would look like and be What is that process like for you as you go about finding people to actually come in and test the equipment.
Yeah, I mean, one one of my best examples of kind of our target customer is my mom. So I have a they live out here half the year, and I get to play with her pretty often. I go out to her you know, ladies events a couple times a year and and get to witness what that's like, you know, playing in that player category and the people that were designing this product for so yeah, that's that's
it's a unique experience. It's definitely different to the the I find that they have a little more anxiety on the course than than what some of the better players might have. A lot of it is just fear of you know, missing a shot and holding your team up or your playing group up. We've uncovered a lot of just unique, unique concerns that we didn't realize before through just observing that customer.
It's interesting you say the anxiety thing, because I caddied in Scotland when I got out of college, and what would happen was we would get a tea time assigned to us. It wasn't a player assigned to us. And I quickly learned that if there was a female in the group, I would go directly to the female because they hit it relatively straight and I didn't feel like there was a lot of to your point, anxiety involved in the round. They seemed very content with being out there.
They seemed to play better than a lot of the older men that I could or would go and caddy for, and I felt like the level of fun was way higher in terms of a female on't Caddy Ford versus a male out Caddy four.
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean not all not all women are created equal, right right, There's definitely variables, and maybe my mom tends to be a little more anxious with that type of stuff and not wanting to let people down that she's playing with. So yeah, I think I think it's important to understand the range of different customers too, not just try to design for one particular
person that we've said is the target consumer. That's why we get you know, like Marty said, we've got a protocol that we use for testing any of our products, and we have a minimum number of players that we try to get within a given player pool to get us a good diverse set of data that we can actually make conclusions off of. The same thing applies to this category of designing clubs for women, as we bring in players of various skill levels, but still those that fit within that product category.
So yeah, Marty, I haven't really asked you this question before. I guess really when we've talked about any product development, but is there a person you're thinking of when you develop golf clubs. Is there a certain handicap, a certain skill set because I guess you know, having these conversations with you about all different types of golf clubs and juniors and females adaptive golf, like there's so much golf
out there. Do you in your brain, because your brain is a very interesting place, does your brain think of a certain golfer? Or is the idea to just try to make something that can kind of umbrella everybody that'd be interested in the product.
Yeah, Shane, So I definitely, and I know all the rest of the product designers and engineers that are working on product, I think we have that archetype of golfer on our mind. Like for Rose brought up the example, it'd be like, oh, yeah, I need when I'm thinking about designing this product or how the head cover fits, or the color palette or the grip texture, I'm going to think about She's probably thinking about her mom right right,
And I'm thinking about that same thing. Who is that one golfer that represents the target customer for that particular product,
And that's very important. I mean, you know, I think the same way for juniors and Rose example of thinking about her mom is a great one of just us being such a golf family here, right, and we all whether it's designing clubs for literally ourselves, if we're working on, you know, a certain product, or now that a lot of us have kids, it's like we got skin in the game on the Prodigy product or Rose's mom is another good example of designing you know, clubs for women.
So I think all of us that are designing product have that one, one typical golfer in their mind when we're designing. And I think that's very important because if you design try to design a product that suits everybody, you actually kind of end up with maybe a suboptimal solution for a lot of folks, right, And I think that's a that's a core tenet of product development.
When did you learn that, Marty, When did you realize that it wasn't It wasn't for it wasn't the idea of designing for everybody? Because I can only imagine you probably have gone through iterations that personally as you've gone through developing products.
Yeah, there's a lot of psychology to this and product development, where, uh, if you get the average of a lot of opinions, you get an average solution. Yeah, and I think, you know, I think there's a there's so much truth to that. And even in our own groups designing products, you know, if you're doing a creative session, you want to have it two to three four people max. Right, Okay, the more folks you get in there chiming in, I think, you know, you start to dilute your opportunity for having
an outside the box or creative solutions. So, but when it comes to defining your target customer, that's also very important. I'm really glad that it ping we've evolved from our days of you know it, two's fit everybody to now we have, you know, basically like six mainline irons. Then we have our ladies product and our junior products, so we can box in our target customer a lot tighter
and really optimized solutions for them. And you know, then we obviously need to make the fitting tools very simple, easy to understand, and things of that nature so you don't get confused by all of our products. So those two things kind to juxtapose each other. But I think we're trying to weave the needle there on that.
Here's a lot of stuff. Now let's try to simplify which club fits you the best. Here you go, Marty, I always like doing this when we talk about product and golfer. Is Okay, I have an eighteen handicap fifty year old male and I have an eighteen handicap fifty year old female. Did what's the difference in those two golfers that you guys are the solution you guys are trying to kind of achieve.
Yeah, So, generally speaking, the fifty year old female probably was going to swing it a little bit slower, right, So in that we want to have the total mass of the club lighter. We want to have more loft on the driver. So all those same tools in our cool optimal launch and spin chart, our impulse momentum model where we figure out the perfect loft to make the ball go far, those same tools can be used. But we want to have a higher law the driver, lighter weight,
probably a little more flexible shaft. And then when we start hitting the ball on the ground without teeing it up, we need to put more loft on the club because of more premium on launching the ball in the air becomes more important as the speed is a little bit slower, right, So we want to get very specific about that. We want to probably short that we want to accommodate to
the build of the golfer. Two. So generally speaking, the female golfer might be a little bit shorter, so we have a shorter standard lengths, and the gapping looks a little bit different too, because especially you know, long irons and mid irons start to become very hard to get
the ball in the air. So with our ladies product, which is that fifty year old female, we make up to a seven hybrid, so a lot so you can you can start your set at literally an eight iron, right you can play four five six or five six seven hybrid than eight iron through the rest of your bag. And one of the big things, and I think is that you know, depending on how far you hit the golf ball, we're not necessarily trying to feel that fifty
year old females bag with fourteen clubs. They might not even need all fourteen clubs, So that bag might look like twelve clubs and that could be totally sufficient from a gamping standpoint. Then it might make room to have a couple extra slots in there to consider a you know, kind of a boutique solution for greenside play only like with our chipper, and so we've had a lot of
Rose talked about the anxiety on the golf course. We have anxiety that applies to men and women, and then that creates more room for a solution like the chipper in the bag.
My buddy Tim gets so excited every time the Chipper's brought up on this podcast. It's like the light bulb goes off. Rose. When you chat with golfers as you go through development and you go through their experiences a lot hitting product. What's the most common request that you get from women about golf clubs? What's the number one problem they might have with certain that they're trying to kind of, you know, figure out.
Yeah, I mean Marty again, I guess going back to my mom as being a representative figure in my mind for this category, I think bunker play is a big one. That's something that I've heard pretty consistently is just challenges getting out of the bunker, and I think in general
just getting the ball near. Marty can can back me up on this or say something else, but I think all of our products are are generally geared toward how do we get the product, get the ball launching more easily and more consistently, so that they can ultimately rely on that as a given versus questioning, oh am I gonna am I gonna top this? Am I going to scull it, you know, one foot off the ground or is it actually going to land softly on the green and give me a chance to put on.
The bunker side of things. We've seen that not just not just with roses mom, but we've seen that persistently with women. Green side play and bunker play uh in general again kind of tends to give them anxiety, whether it's you know technique I think being nervous, maybe never being taught to open the face to get that ball in the air out of the bunker, having a little bit less speed to kind of to kind of get underneath the ball and get that club through the bunker.
So we've innovated on that. And in the gl three irons, the sand wedge has the I too hozzle, so the I two is kind of like the ultimate bunker club. We've talked about that a little bit, where the hozzle transition is much sharper, like thirty five percent less cross sexual area, so it digs into the sand, so if you do nothing else, that ball is going to get out of the bunker more easily. So we've taken again, we kind of went back to like, how do you know,
how do you define the golfer? How do you design products a little bit differently, and that is a different priority. We've seen with the female golfer that anxiety out of the bunker, and we've tried to innovate directly on that with the j L E three sandweg that comes in the set Rose.
When did this become a big focus for peing? When did clubs for women become a focus for ping? Because, as Marty said earlier, I mean the idea, you know, decades ago was here's an amazing set of irons, everybody can play it, and now you know, there's obviously plenty of solutions for plenty of different players and different handicaps. Right.
Yeah, it's funny you say that because I was actually at lunch today with a group of women that work in our engineering and legal departments, and Stacy Powells joined as well at lunch, and she was I asked her this question actually because I don't know the answer is as far as when was our first uniquely designed for women product? And she kind of she said, we used to apply a different color to the irons and kind
of make them lighter weight for women. And then there was a transition point, Marty, I don't know if it was around the G twenty five five days or if it was earlier than that.
Yeah, I think it was around the G fifteen to G twenty time frame. And the first one was it the Rhapsody. I think it was our first lady's product line, ladies' specific product line. Yeah, I think you're right, Marty.
Your brain does your brain just live in product like years? You know, like, yeah, when you close your eyes, you know when G landed, fifteen, landed, thirty landed, Like can you are you pretty? Are you pretty? Dialed on the time of your life and where you were in your.
Wildly, it's way stronger than the actual years. That's one hundred percent correct, I think. On on the brand, just supporting women's golf, Sheen. I mean, I think a big staple everyone's pretty familiar with is the Solheim Cup and around I think it was around nineteen ninety is when Carston, you know, helped get the soul on cup off the ground, and I think kind of you know it ping. It tends to always go back to our founder, and you Carson is who got all the fame and attention for creating,
paying the brand, the answer putter, and everything. But his wife Louise was, if you talk to any of the family members here, like the bedrock that helped get the company up and going. I mean, she was doing all the grunt work while Carson was out doing the engineering and sales of the product. She was doing the accounting
and the sales and all the back end stuff. And then eventually, you know, when the company got bigger, she was taking care of all the HR and really laid the foundation of taking care of all the employees and creating that kind of family culture. And that's what Stacey Pals does for us today, is she's in charge of all the HR and maintaining that and keeping that going. So you know, if you read the books about the
family and the brand, Louise is like the staple. And we named one of the hutters after her in the new gl product line. We have a Louise model that it's named after her.
Very cool and I have always been interested in this because I've seen it in my life, especially with some of my older golfing buddies. Is you'll occasionally get male golfers that will lean into the female golf line because again some of the stuff that they don't do well, the answers are proven if you dive into that space. Do you see a little bit of that, Marty, Yeah, So.
I got an interesting story on that because one of the thoughts in my in my head, Shane was like, we quite often will bring out a new technology in the ladies line first, and this is I think a good testament that we do. We don't wait. If we have something good, we don't wait for it in our mainline product. We'll we'll deliver it into our clubs for women first. I think a good example that is our tr grooves we had in our putter line. I think
now you're seeing it. We have a brand new fitting head that's called AFS three D, which is one head allows you to fit three different color codes and power spec all with one head, five different options. Bringing that out in the g L E three first, I had a good buddy of mine mini tour player. You might remember.
His name is Barry Concert and he's a good mini tour player around the valley, and but he hits the ball pretty low, so we always need a high lofted driver kind of hit down on it, didn't generate enough spin, hit his long irons low, and we he wanted to look at a nine, a nine wood, and we at the time, this like a decade ago, we we didn't have a nine wood in a in our mainline. We just went up to the seven and I was like, hey, we should go to our ladies line and I'm gonna
build you a nine wood out of here. And it had a different color paint to it and different graphics on it, and he did not care. He was like, I need I need this club to get the ball in the air, go a certain distance, land steep. And he played our Ladies nine wood and absolutely loved it.
Uh and and uh and couldn't couldn't care less, right, And we had another golfer, Matt Simone and our engineering group who played the Ladies twelve degree driver is his second is this kind of like a fair wayfinder driving here in the desert And he loved it as well. So there's definitely, uh, some some really fun good examples of that over the.
Years, Marty, if you're watching someone hit balls at the proving grounds and you know that a club for ladies for women could be helpful in that space. I mean, it's twenty twenty three. The world is a different place than maybe it was back in like the precept lady Laddie days. But when do you introduce that club to potentially be in their bag? I mean, how do you present that? Because men are you know, we're stubborn in
stupid people. You know, we have a hard time sometimes accepting the fact that maybe this would actually help your golf game.
Just hit it. I mean I built this club and gave it to Barry Concert. He hit it and the ball went, you know, two hundred and thirty five yards straight up in the air, and there you go the p person, the experience, and you just absolutely loved it. I mean, once you hit something and realize it's the right club, there's a pain knowing that you might not be able to have that right. It's there's some loss of version there. So that's where you've got to have the golfer just try it, and once they try it
and fall in love with it. It's worked in a couple of really fun examples here.
Rose, what has it been like being involved at PING for a couple of decades and seeing this movement, you know, for women as golf's become more popular in different circles and now you know, seeing these lines, seeing these commercials the last few weeks, the car Banks doing an amazing job of voicing those commercials. What is it like seeing the company that you work for really lean into this side of the game.
It's awesome, obviously, It's It's not a surprise to me because I think, like Marty said, we've had a long history of supporting women's golf.
But it's great.
I think the the investment that that Ping has made in the women's side of the game and making products for women, it's consistent and yeah, like I said, I'm not too surprised and pleasantly pleased it.
Rose, have you been bummed out that that Rose Zang is now maybe the most popular Rose and golf? I mean, I feel like you probably have for years you.
Had to say that.
Yeah, you know, I'm just happy to see another Rose in my general like generation because for a long time I was I was the only Rose that I knew of that was within a couple decades of my my birth date. So yeah, I'm okay with it.
Yeah, Titanic was years ago, you know, I mean rote Rose, that's exactly right. You hit your stride by. My wife is Cindy, and we joke a lot about this. You know, she goes on, I'm at a Cindy. Oh is she's seventy or eighty? I mean there's really only one of two ways to go about that, Marty. I wanted to ask about LPGA players because you guys have a lot of great LPGA players on staff at Ping. How do you fit LPGA players and what line do they typically lean into?
Yeah, Shane, it's uh, we we do really good on the LPHPGA tour. We have an awesome Rep Scott Wolpa, who takes such a great care of the staff, and he's an awesome fitter and he loves all the tools and a lot of them we've talked about. He's using co pilot and gapping out and poll namic and get our players dialed in, so all these same tools that our fitters have access to. Scott's been testing and vetting
for us. Our LPGA tour players are fantastic. I think a couple of key differences from the men's tour is that they generally drive the ball straighter in terms of fairways hit, so there's a little bit more of a premium.
And we are One of our last couple podcasts was the whole distance versus accuracy topics, So we give ourselves permission to help put that priority on getting more distance off the tee because when you look at fairway hit percentages, they are way higher because the fairways are similar with to the PGA Tour, but they're not but their cone is about the same, so their fairway hit percentage is really higher. So that's a key difference off the tee.
And then I I think we have over the last five to eight years dominated with our I series Iron So this is I two hundred, I two ten, and now I two thirty. On any given week, the percentage of those played on the LPGA Tour is between that fifteen to twenty five percent for that one Iron model alone, Right, So I think and I kind of wish the American golfer was a little bit more like the Japanese consumer.
They study and admire the women's tour on Japanese Tour even more than the men's tour because it's more relatable in terms of the distance they hit it, the trajectories how they play golf. I think the American golfer can maybe lean on that a little bit at least to kind of give yourself permission to really look at what the LPGA Tour players are playing, because that I two thirty iron is the perfect sweet spot. It's they have an ample amount of distance, but they need a little
bit more spin to get that stopping power. They need a little bit more bounce with the soul design, even though they don't take big divots. That gives them that turf interaction forgiveness and they like that good blend of distance control with the right amount of forgiveness. And that's the exactly the sweet spot of our I series iron. And we put a lot of priority on that I two thirty iron designing it thinking with the LPGA Tour player in mind when we design that iron.
What's the biggest difference in an LPGA Tour player's bag versus a PGA Tour player's bag. Because we talked a little bit about the eighteen handicap for you know, male versus female fifty year old player, what's the biggest difference. If I was going to look through the ping staffers on the LPGA and then the ping staffers on the PGA Tour, what's the biggest difference, not necessarily in what club they're playing, but maybe what types of clubs they're playing.
Yeah, totally different in terms of where they transition. So you'll see LPGA I would say probably the average LPGA Tour player on our staff probably ends their irons at a five iron, right, some of them like Dana Finkelstein she just got married this last year, Dana Fall She plays all the way up to a seven hybrid, then starts her set at an eight iron, and she is
incredible her dispersion with those hybrids. So they transition to hybrids earlier, and they'll have multiple hybrids in the bag then, as I think you would expect Shane the lofts on their fairway woods and a few more high lofted fairway woods, even though that's super popular on the PGA Tour. Now we've talked about that. With the seven woods and nine woods out there, you see just a higher percentage of that. Now. Interestingly, LPGA tours tend to hit up on the ball more
on their driver. Okay, so the lofts they play are actually pretty similar to the PGA Tour because the PGA Tour has a wider range of hitting up and hitting down, like you know, you hit down on your driver, your stock driver, like three degrees or so. But on the LPGA Tour, almost all the players are hitting up more
their swing directions more to the right. They're hitting more up so they can play what you would think is a lower loft in driver than you might expect, which is pretty interesting, Marty.
I've never asked you this either, but what is the average what is the average loft now in terms of tour players both male and female in the driver category, Because when I was in high school, you know, back in the late nineties, early two thousands, you know, you'd see good players playing seven degree drivers, you know, seven and a half degree drivers, and then it went the other way. I remember there was a time. This was again talking Marty language, This is probably g twenty days.
I remember I had I had like an eleven and a half degree driver at one point, and it almost looked like like a three wood it when I look down at it, and it seems like it's kind of gone somewhere in the middle of that. What do you feel like is the average tour player loft?
Yeah, I think the average is probably around nine and a half. Shane, I would say for the PGA Tour, and it's probably pretty similar quite frankly for the LPGA Tour. Now that said, I would say right now, there's a wider range in lost than there's ever been. I mean, we have some players that are playing very low loft them, some players playing very high lofted because how they dynamically deliver is very different on the PGA Tour, and then their range and angles of attack is very different on
the PGA Tour. So that just you know, whenever you talk averages, you also got to think ranges, because it's the range. If everyone was average, we wouldn't need custom fitting. I mean, it's the ranges that are so important to be able to cover those en ranges so we can fit you perfectly on that optimal launch and spin chart that our fitters absolutely love.
Rose. We mentioned off the top that you played collegiate golf at Michigan. How's the golf game these days?
Almost non existent?
Oh no, yeah, you're working too hard.
Yeah, I've got two young kids, so they occupy most of my time. It's hard to find a few hours to spare, so I do like to still get out.
Though, Rose, Why don't you tell Shane the fun little contribution that University of Michigan has had to our campus that you can see cruise around campus.
Oh.
Yes, So it didn't come directly from the University of Michigan. It came from my parents. They they had a golf cart that they had. My whole family is is alumni of the University of Michigan, and so they had a place in Florida.
They they had a.
Golf cart that they adorned with U of M colors and the logos and whatnot. And when they moved out to Arizona, they didn't have a use for it anymore. So they said, Hey, do you think you could use this at ping And I said, yeah, I think so, So we do have. It's very faded at this point because the Arizona sun is not kind, but it's still kind of resembles the Maze and blue.
Paying is a Michigan campus, is what you're telling me. I like to hear that. That's that's good to know.
There's at least one or two other people that are that are Michigan fans, but Ohio State I think has its beat on campus.
I wasn't. I thought the rules we weren't going to bring them up on this podcast. I was Brian hard Rose, you can edit that out. So, Rose, is most of your golf now played like product development? You going out and hitting clubs, you know, at the proving grounds? Like is that where you do most of the swinging these days versus going out on a golf course and playing eighteen holes.
Yeah, I mean it's much easier for me to sign up for player testing here on campus during my work day and benefit you know, the testing that we're doing as well as myself with hitting hitting a few balls. But yeah, I try to get out every now and then with coworkers and at least maintain some awareness of how the work that my team and I are doing
translates into the product that we're that we're producing. It's actually kind of a nice luxury, I'll say, to be a little more distant from the game and not play it as often because it gives me a fresh perspective on how how much advancement we make product to product.
So as an example, I just refreshed my bag with all the new G thirty product and the I two thirty irons, and that's been awesome because I've been like, wow, my game goes like this and the product goes like this, and I end up kind of about where I've been previously. So it's it's really cool to see. And I try to come back and relay that to the team as often as I can to say this is you guys do amazing work.
Rose. When you take a month or two off of golf, those first range balls you hit always seem to be perfect. It's the second range session for me where I go or do I put my hands on the club but I don't really quite remember how to do it. But I always feel like the first, like the first long break from golf. When you return to it, it's like take it back, swing through and that thing goes relatively straight.
Yeah, and you have some you don't have all the like recent memories to bring you down. It's more like, oh, this could be fun.
This is what I want to do. Marty always fun to talk about product development, very cool to see new lines and as you guys continue to kind of expand, really the offerings I mean, I think that's what I've learned the most, you know, seeing the campus and getting a chance to chat with you this much is how many offerings there are for golfers, because you know, in my space, you know, when I was coming in, I'm like, what am I going to play? You know, I'm looking
at blueprint? Am I going to be a blueprint guy? And to realize there are literally five sets of irons that I could play and be content with. There are multiple fairway woods that I could play. I mean, I'm going to the US amitur next week. I have four woods I'm taking with me because that's I mean, would I wouldn't have had that last year, you know, I wouldn't have had this many offerings. It's just so cool to see how much the products expand to fit every golfer out there.
Yeah, Shane, and I think, you know, to kind of circle back to one of the things Roe said that we've really had some insights out to the female golfer of having some anxiety on the golf course. Well, that same thing really applies to the custom fitting process. I think a lot of women are nervous about going out and get custom fit, you know, a lot of men are too. They have doubts in their mind. They don't want someone to see their swing. They think they're thinking,
I'm not good enough to get custom fit. So I think a really good practical piece of advice is to start and learn about the fitting process and figure out what model might be best for you using our webfit tool. So if you go to webfitt ping dot com, this is an amazing set of algorithms. They will just ask you a series of questions, how you play golf, what do you struggle with now? Are you male or female?
What's your handicap? And it will give you a really good starting point like ninety percent jumpstart to your fitting process. So if you're out there female golfer, or your shopping, your maybe your your spouse wants to get into the game, go to webfit dotping dot com, answer those questions, print out those results and bring them to your local fitter because that will answer that question for you of which
set is right for me. We don't want to have too many models and too many things out there and then confuse golfers, so we want to make it very actionable. One of the other things to notte there Shane, is that there is a graduation point. Rose talked about just building herself a new set of g four thirties and loving them and I two thirty irons. There's a graduation point, and Rose hits it pretty far where that lady's product might not be the best product for all women. Right,
we talked about boxing in your target customer. Our ladies product is really optimized for ladies who hit their have a driver swing speed of about eighty miles an hour or less, which means you're gonna hit your driver one hundred and eighty to two hundred yards or less. Rose hits it significantly further than that, so she and kind of her category of golfer graduates up into our mainline product.
So there is that transition point. Webfit can help answer that question for any of our consumers out there, and then for our fitters, we have awesome tools built into co Pilot to help determine that and again help answer that question of set configuration. How should I build the bag, which is the longest iron I can play? How do I piece together the wedges? How many clubs do I need in the bag to really make good use of the gapping Marty.
Do you guys have conversations with fitters about the anxiety? You know, if you have somebody coming and they're on the range and you can just sense that anxiety from the player, is there a way And I mean I've dealt with plenty of fitters at Ping, and everybody is really personable. I think it's actually a big part of that job, is the personality part of it, because you know, you have to start the conversation, get the mind off
the golf swing. Is what is the conversation like behind the scenes with fitters about trying to kind of squeeze that anxiety out of a player that feels a little tight or tense as they start to hit golf balls.
Yeah, totally. I think that's what separates the good from great. In the fitter they're like psychologists. You know, you're working with the golfer, your understanding them. You're like the butcher harmon, what are you gonna what is he saying into the golfer's ear and then he's hitting him good? You know type of thing. And Yeah, deflating that anxiety is a very important skill. So you can do things like let's say the golfers hit three or four terrible shots in
a row. Hey, I'm gonna step away for a minute and put another club together over here. Give him a few shots to hit on their own, interesting right, so they can kind of have that in private, right. So that's one tactical practical technique. Another one we've talked about when we've looked at our Arco stata is that you hit a lot of shots. And this is also true
for the female golfer that are off fatigue. So there's no problem in the fitting process to uh, put those irons on a tee because you're gonna hit maybe half of those or a third of those iron shots on the golf golf course off of tea. So that is another really good technique. But yeah, I think the great fitter can kind of put you at ease, give your you know, deflate that anxiety. And that's again, Shane, where
our tools come in. We can have a golfer hit, you know, get some good data with their seven iron, and then we can figure out, using our algorithms how to build out that full bag so the golfer doesn't have to exhaust themselves trying to hit a lot of shots with clubs that might be a little bit harder to hit, especially off the ground, or especially if you don't have good lies in your fittings scenario.
Yeah, I mean it's it's like caddy in Marty. I mean, you know when you have a great caddy that can you're playing a place that you've always wanted to play, or it's a bucket list golf course and you're nervous. You know, the best caddies can ease a little bit out of that out of you. They're not gonna be able to take it all out of it exactly, but to ease, you know, the nerves in the golf game,
get the conversation going out, you have kids. You know how many times have you been here, things like that, to just get your mind off Oh my goodness, I gotta hit this five iron grade or it's going to be in the ocean. You know, those things are really important, exact Rose, I would say, the real all star of this podcast, outside of you, of course, is your mom. I really hope your mom listens to this episode. What's her name, by the.
Way, I hope she does.
Her name's I hope she doesn't kill me for exposing her deep spears on this podcast.
Now Kara's the all Star. I'm telling you we got to give her a big shout out. Rose, I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for joining us, Thanks for all the insight. We're fans of you obviously, and congrats on the many years of ping and all that you do there.
Yeah, thank you.
I appreciate it.
Shane and Marty as always, thank you for the insights as well. This is the Ping Proving Grounds Podcast.