Episode 19: Adaptive Fitting

in the world. And Paul, I was reading through the different types of adaptive fittings that PING offers and I can only imagine this is a list that continually gets updated. Players in wheelchairs, assist of cards, amputee stroke survivors, seniors, blind golfers, little people, and even in one case, the tallest person in Britain. Paul, I'm gonna start with you, how did you build that list? At and how often is that list updated to expand the offerings that the company has?

Mardi ever was. I'm not a particularly mechanical person, but I would go find who can help me help this person and then we would okay, great, now we know how to fit this guy. And the next one would come up, and the next one will come up, and it's just been a really fun project to try to build up and you nailed it from the start, like, how do we fit anybody on the planet if you want to play golf? We love the game. We think it's a great game and there's no reason why almost

anyone can't play. And that's been the philosophy. So like one of the very very first people we fit in I think it was two thousand and six. Two thousand and seven, Marty, I think, remember this too. I get an email from our customer service team and they it's a guy called Jeff Lewis. He lives in an Arizona and I remember it distinctly because it's like a three line email. He said, Hey, I my name is Jeff. I used to play golf and then I've had this

illness and I'm a quadrupe. I'm patina. I don't have any arms and I don't have any legs, and I would like to play golf again. Can you help me? And I was like, I have no idea, how are you going to grip the club? Can you come in and see us and we'll try to figure it out. And so a week later he comes in and we get a bunch of our engineers and interns and we brainstorm and we figure out how to get this guy

gripping a golf club. And that's how It's been a lot of trial and error and things that have gone terribly wrong, and then things that go a bit right the next time, and Jeff's still playing now fifteen years later. He won his local competition a couple of years ago and got accused of being a sandbagger, which was the.

You're figuring out, Like Paul said with Jeff, how is the golfer going to grip the club? That's the first thing you do, and normally in our fitting process you get everything dialed in okay, you know, then the grip is the last thing you do, right, So it's flipping that in reverse, and that's been very healthy for us as engineers to be able to think differently. Like Paul talked about.

We'll figure it out. And as Marty said, we created that fitting bag that covers ninety nine percent of cases. You know, someone who's needs a very long club, a very short club, or they're playing from a chair where they need a very flat club. We had those options, but it was little little bits. You know, if you just work on something just you know, a couple of hours a week over ten years, it starts that up.

And we've been very lucky. We're a family company. The Solheim family have always said to me, go for it, Like, if you want to work on this and you've got as long as you're getting everything else to hunt like, you go for it. But just in the last few years, we've started to see more momentum and more people realizing, yeah, okay, I can play golf in a seated position, I can swing one handed, I can play with these exotic paddles.

That helped me group a club when I didn't think I could group a club and suddenly, now the demand has grown and now we make it work. We have a full time adaptive fitter called Brian, and it's amazing. It's a full time job for someone to keep up with the demand we've created. And that was that's just great to see because I think, you know, the latest stat I saw was the sixty million people in America who live with a disability of some kind of one

in five people in America. And golf is an amazing sport, you know, because you can take your time, we can adapt the clubs to you. There's a lot of things going for it in terms if you can play from a seated position like a lot of sports you just couldn't do that, So it lends itself well to we can figure this out. We just have to show people. You just have to you know, look, you can play this game with a sixty five inch driver, which is

super cool to see and an amazing skill. So that's how it's been, you know a little and often, and now we have a full time fiddo.

So someone's already paid fitter and they have the basic tools, they have the kind of nine degree head, they have the standard length, you know, regular flex stiff legs, so we're trying to add in the extra things that would help and so on the grip side, you know, often oversized grips can be very helpful if someone has a weak grip or they're swing in one handed, go into

something light and big can be good. We've actually used Poto groups, so we you know, in the Rules of Golf, a grip has to be symmetrical, but if you have a medical need, you can kind of go outside that a little bit. So we could put a PP sixty pot of grip on a full swing club, and we've

done that many times. We have these paddles, the sort of very big paddle that can actually go right next to someone's armpit and they can use that to kind of grip the club and swing around their body, which is, you know, very bespoked, but it works for golfers who have very short limbs and maybe are struggling to grip the club. Elsewhere we have very long and very short chefs, so just expanding our normal range. You know, a normal fitting bag might have plus an inch and a half

to minus an inch. We have plus twelve inches to minus fifteen inches. That kind of thing, and similar with things like li angele, where often in a fitting you're dialing in a li angele by one or two degrees. In an adaptive thing, you might be dialing in the li angele plus eight degrees or minus eight degrees. So a lot of that, you know, and going very light, a lot of lightweight stuff. So we'll do things like we'll take ahead and we'll take the back weight out completely.

You know, it's not optimizing the head for moment of inertia, but it's sure optimizing the clubhead if you're swinging one handred. So that's a flavor of what's in the bag.

the mechanical guy. He basically did the hard work of imagining what that would need to look like for him to swing, and we helped him realize that. And his set his job is sixty six inches long with this huge panel all the way down to his potter. I think he is fifty eight inches long and it's amazing. The thing that sticks with me that he said was it's one of the few things in his life that adapted to him. He spent his whole life adapting to the world. You know, the world was not built with

him in mind in terms of how ergonomics are. This is one of the few things that was adapted to him, which is what we're trying to do in custom fitting for everyone, right We're trying to fit the golf club to you, not fit you to the golf club. So he's just a great example of that. We've had some real fun with, say partially cited golfers, where we've people who can just about see a line of a club, but not enough to be able to see is that

a seven iron or an eight iron. So we've taken clubs and like painted the whole head a particular color, and I think they look amazing. The set of g irons where the seven iron is bright blue, the eight iron is green, the nine iron is yellow. Simple stuff didn't change the performance, but now for a mostly blind golfer, they can look in the bag and see exactly what they've got. We've done and we did a set recently

for a shorter statue golfer. I think he's between four and five feet tall, and everything in his bag is between five and ten inches short of our standard. It's not that difficult to build. You just have to really know what you're doing in terms of how do you build up the grip. You know a lot of wraps of wraps of tape under the grip and being careful with weight and things like that, and that's where we

can leverage our engineering knowledge. It's fun for us because it's a great engineering challenge as well as being just a really fun thing to help people play the best.

of always having to adapt themselves elsewhere. How has that been like for you personally and for your team to get to see people come to you and go, I want to play golf, even though I don't look or or feel like you know, a golfer that comes to paying every day. What's that been like?

you leave hitting it one hundred and fifty yards. It's amazing, you know. And I remember distinctly. We work with a lot of military organizations and there's one in the UK called Battleback, and we were sponsoring Battleback and they're people who have been injured in service. So they're active service people.

They've got injured, they might have lost some limbs, but these are big, strong, athletic people who are now not able to do what they want to do and they're not able to play sport the way they used to. And so I showed up at a fitting day for this with our director of marketing and he shares with me or I've never done a club fitting ever. I said,

don't worry, it'll be fine. Just stick with me. And we've got a couple of guys who are both double leg amputees and they cannot make contact with the ball. You know, they're in their twenties, they're fit, they're strong, and they're frustrating because they don't know what it's like to try to play sport on prosthetic legs. And so we helped figure out, okay, what's the disconnect here, and in their case, it was this feeling that I'm going to fall forward. If you're on prosthetic legs, you kind

of need to be stable. You don't want to feel like you're going to fall over. So all we did was lengthen the clubs, which normally you know as a risky thing to do in a club fitting, to go

very long in your ions. We put these guys in two inch long irons, and suddenly they could swing around their prosthetic legs instead of feeling like they were going to fall forward, and then nailing shots down in the ferry and they're having long drive competitions with each other and suddenly the competitive spirit is flowing and they're just like, this is what we want to do. I want to kick his can, I say ass on a podcast. I want to kick his ass on the court. And that's

all it was, right. They wanted that competitive and it's so cool to see he went from hitting it zero yards to two hundred yards and all I did was put a slightly longer golf club in his hands, you know. So for me, it's great to share that with the rest of the team.

what exact technique could they use? And is that something thing you know that Brian and our team have actively done helped trying to figure out you know, if we transpose it to a regular club fitting world, it's that marriage of fitting and teaching, right, but maybe there's a little bit more priority on the teaching side, or so here's some ideas to try.

them playing a better golf. This is kind of the same thing on steroids of Okay, what do we need to do for you to be comfortable hitting the golf you mentioned kind of doing the fitting backwards and doing some of the things that are normally at the end of the fitting, like grip of length, doing them first. It's because it's like, how do we get you swinging comfortably? And once you're swinging comfortably, then we can dial in

other things. So yeah, I'd say it's maybe a bit less technique and more like ergonomics is not quite the right word, but you know what I mean. It's it's asking the questions of what's stopping you being at a swing freely. But it comes back to and it's just the same for you and me and our daily life here, my Marty, that asking good questions is eighty percent of the job.

together and the rip fastens in there. So that was a lot of fun. Paul, what are some other, like, you know, fun designs we've done, or attachment methods or things that have been a little more outside the box.

which is cool to be at the optimization side. I think some of the attachments of like how do you if you're building a very long club right now, one of the things we're working on is how do you It's very hard to transport a sixty six inch long club, so how do we disassemble that club? You know in a way that it still feels solid when you put it together? So working on some screw attachments, like a pool queue to take a club apart and be able

to transport it. We've done some stuff, working initially with Jeff who was the dupline pt. I mentioned finding a way to actually get a club to screw directly into his prosthetic, but then have a quick release mechanism. So we made this spring. I think you probably remember it was an intern that worked on that. It's a great little project for a summer intern. It's a spring mechanism and once the club is in, the spring holds it

solid and he can swing. But to take that club out you just have to push it twisted and it comes out and you put a different club in it.

We've used that for a couple of other players in different ways, and then we're thinking about, well could that inspire some things, you know, regular product line, and you know, I think some of the stuff on our justable length potters have kind of taken a bit of inspiration from some of the adaptive So I think there's a good chance in futures and more of these adaptive things will end up in regular clubs.

of different ways. Shane, When you were at the proving ground and we went in toured our manufacturing area, you see a lot of little, one off, little components and pieces that are made through the three D printing process. From a manufacturing standpoint, we're talking about making bespoke one

off components that are actually used in products. Here for the adaptive program when it comes to mainline product development, it's really helpful to go from I see something on the computer, I can I can hit print on the printer, go to lunch, come back half a day later, maybe four hours go by, and you have that actual three D part to look at. Maybe you reshape the driver, maybe you reshape the irons a little bit. You want to work on the little nuances of how they look

and transition. And basically, when you're in the core cycle of designing product, you could look at two iterations in one day. You can print one out overnight when you go home and and and go home for the night and see it first thing in the morning. You can make a tweak to it, print another one, see another copy in the afternoon. It's really helped accelerate that process. Now, fast forward to today's age. You can three D print

out of a lot of different materials. So you know, now we're in the age of you know, metal three D printing with a lot of different material properties, and that's open up the door even even even more, you know, kind of another.

be out in you know, thirty seconds. I mean, it can only it's only going to get quicker, Paul, for you guys in this space and adapt of I mean, I can only imagine that the three D printing. When you have a customer come your way that is in need of something you guys haven't attacked yet, having that as an option makes your job all the easier.

the name. But just in the last two years, like you said that, we sponsored a tournament called the US Disabled Golf Championship which has really grown was this year is sponsored by the PGA of America and they hosted it over in Ports of Lucy and there were about one hundred competitors and some really good players and really good mix. That's been going through few years. The USGA's

got involved. They have the Adaptive Open now and I think at least a few people who are watching or listening to this podcast probably saw there were some highlights on the Golf Channel, which was great to see on TV some of these really good players. And then on the European Tour or the DP World Tour, they've had

a couple of events. They've got a little mini tour where they play alongside the DP World Tour main event, and they'll have like twelve to twenty Adaptive athletes who are playing their competition on the same course at the same time, and it just gives visibility to the events. And some of these athletes are so good. I mean, we're our first Adaptive brand Ambassador staff player Kwan Pastigo,

who's a young Spanish guy. He's scratch player. You know, he's won a couple of those events they're on, you know, TV Quoite a bit in Europe and he does the whole thing swinging on one leg and it's amazing to watch together three hundred yard drives on one leg. I'm quite jealous, to be honest. I think it's grown along.

be able to watch the US Adaptive Open. I know it's in its second iteration this year, and there were highlights on the Golf Channel, But I think the hope for golf fans out there is this eventually will be on television where you could watch, you know, the last couple of rounds on TV.

this whole project back in two thousand and six. He said, when it boils down with it, all I want is to be out to suffer golf the same way you suffer golf. I want to be just as annoyed missing a three book on as you. Is that so much to ask?

we are these days. On these things, I would love to chat to people, but you know, through the website's probably the easiest. And then you know, if you're in the States, there's a whole bunch of organizations, Like I said, the US Disabled Golf Association, there's the one Armed Golf Associations, the Seated Golfers Association. So just doing a bit of a Google search, you can kind of a couple kinds of great organizations, probably locally your area.

is Brian? Like, how often is Brian going about fittings on a week to week basis? You know?

He's working on special one offs. We're supporting an amputee conference where it's actually someone outside of being who's who's invented a way to attach a golf club to to someone's prosthetic for someone who's a double arm amputee, and we're supporting that. He's doing all kinds of things. It's wonderful, it's a it's a great example of I think we're at that point where momentum is. You know, people have seen I could do this, and I want to. I want to come and get the best equipment I can.

I want to get out there and beat my friends. It's great.

He was too tall and his wrist was to floor with so we had to kind of go back and go, okay, if we were to extend the chart, what would that look like? So we made basically made a bigger version of our color coach chart to kind of go, okay, what's a decent length recommendation and color code recommendation. So we now have this expanded version of our color code chart that he inspired, and so we were able to

build some clubs ahead of time. And when you go really long, you have to watch out for things getting too heavy, So we did a few things just try to lighten things up when you're when you're playing a four inch over length club, you've got to take some weight out of that head. And that was the biggest challenge. And we built him a belly putter for him was a normal putter. So it's a forty one inch you know now would be an omelock. That was his normal length putter. It's fun project, Marty.

entire bag being the same lengthd iron. When you have someone come through the fitting process that is extremely tall and you've kind of got to mess around with weight, I can only imagine that helps you, guys when you want to dive into something like a single length iron project or trying to fit even you know, a professional golfer for something like that.

And then, you know, Paul and I were just talking earlier today about you know, some things we've learned through adaptive that have kind of given us a little clues or hints. It's forced us to be more creative, to think differently. That has inspired some things that have made their way into our mainline product.

going forward. So kudos to you and the crew. Very very cool to hear these stories. And if you could, just Marty, if you could remind people where they could go to kind of read stories or check out where they might be able to get fit.

loaner program is awesome. You go to any Ping account and express interest in this and we will help get that bag to the account if you can't come to us here in Phoenix and be able to provide you with with those tools. So a lot of fun, as Paul said, a lot of ways to get a hold of us and get access to this program.