The guys from paying 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 with Marty Jertsen, and we're gonna talk today about fitting. And I know we talk so much about fitting in and around golf. It's very, very important. Everybody kind of screams at players, now, you gotta get fit.
You gotta go get fit.
I wanted to start with you about what you do in terms of your own fitting. You're a great player, you've played a major championships. How much time do you spend on your own golf bag? How much time do you spend kind of putting together what you're gonna go out and play with in terms of fourteen clubs?
Yeah, I mean luckily I get to experiment with that quite a bit. But Shane, I think what I do is I schedule my fittings once or twice a year with one of our master fitters, and I tell them, hey, treat me as if you don't know who I am, right, and so they they can make sure I don't come in with any bias about my own personal game, and they can try to find something that I'm too biased to be aware of with my own observation, even with all my experience and playing experience. So I love doing
that as an advanced player. Once or twice a year schedule, fitting have an expert come and look at your game, and they help me with a lot of things that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of. Looking at a new option, looking at a new club, looking at a new build, looking at a high lofted ferrywood with the shorter length, ask me questions about where I'm playing golf, what tournaments have coming up, what are my pain points on the golf course, looking at my own course stats, in things of that nature.
So I think that's very important. Is you know, it would be easy for me to try to self fit myself, and I've tried to do that, and it's better if I have an expert look at my game.
Yeah, I mean there's inn a sense that goes into it. I mean everybody could go to a club champion and say I'm gonna get fit here and have an idea of a club they have in mind. But the way it feels like fitting has moved into is if you can go in unbiased in terms of what you're looking for, maybe even what you think you're going to get fit into.
There's so much technology involved now. There's there's so much data that you can look through, and we've spent days looking through computers and robots and all sorts of things that really help a golfer understand way more about their own golf game than maybe they ever even thought they knew.
Yeah, and I think that's the big thing that data is useful for. It's to have findings that you you as a golfer, you hit a bad shot on the course. Let's say you got it your eight iron or something, and you wipe it over to the right, you know, and you just try to forget about it. I try to wipe it out of my mind or uh, you know. We come in here to the putting lab, will ask the player, well, do you miss your putts to the
left or to the right more? Well, I don't know about you, but I try to forget about my missus. I don't know if I missed more to them as well. So that's where the data can be really helpful. And and going to see an expert that can ask you those questions that you wouldn't otherwise be aware that that's even a thing, right, and extract that out of you and and uh and try to find something insightful and useful.
And and we've come a long way and in technology and the in the usefulness of data and weaving that into the fitting process.
Let's go back in terms of history. You said we've come a long way. I mean PING was at the forefront in terms of fitting players into clubs that work for them and not necessarily giving them something off the rack. In your time here, how much has fitting changed.
Oh, it's been tremendous. I mean Carson kind of put the industry on the map, and in terms of democratizing fitting because he wanted to make custom fitting available for everybody free of charge, like no extra cost. We can change your lining goals, we can do different lengths, we can do grip size, and those are our staple foundations of custom fitting that are still at the heart. Those are the foundation. But in my time here, this is when I first started working at PING, is when launch
monitors first came on the scene. I mean we were one of the first places here at the proving grounds to have a TrackMan, right and before that, we had ultrasonic sensors on the range that triangulated where the ball landed, and that's what we were doing.
Technologies made it almost it's made it more advanced, but also easier.
Yeah, yes, more advance and sad sometimes you're measuring things that you don't need to measure, so that's important and I think that's important lesson for the golfer is that not everything that you can measure should be something you're trying to optimize for. And that's something I think we can get into the weeds on. But yeah, I mean now from fast forward from when we were one of the first to have launch monitors here to now, there's consumer launch monitors and a lot of people have them
in their homes, in their garage. You go to the range, you see a garment r ten, you see the you know, flights go mevo pluses out there and things of that nature. So people, you know, I think every every ten years or so, the everyday golfer kind of has tools and technology that you know, the tour players have or us on the research side. So you know, the early days of launch monitors though, it was hey, now we can measure this. Then the question became, well what do you
do with it? Right? And so that's where we came up with this in flight fitting software to say, okay, this is your ball speed launching spin on a driver? Is that good or bad? What is optimal? What is good gapping? And really having those launch monitors tools tech. Now you know, you've seen our focal system which measures you know, it's kind of like an MRI machine for your golfer.
And there's like ninety cameras in this room. When they're covering you around, it's wild. It feels like you're in an EA sports game exactly. That's the same technology, right. So but that's allowed.
Us to ask questions of you know, get insights out of those tools, and really it could be a situation where it gets too complex and you, the golfer, might get overwhelmed. Hey there's too much technology. What are all these numbers mean? I think it's very important for us at paying to make the complex simple, right is to take to do that.
I mean because when I'm hitting balls and I'm looking at TrackMan numbers. There's so much information on the screen, and there's terms that every day golfers don't understand what a smash factor, How important is ball speed versus club head speed. How do you take all of the information that's available now and give it to a player in an hour that they can actually understand and take home and and trust in the equipment.
Yeah, I think that's a tricky part. Is is you take all those measurements that you can measure, well, what what are the key one? What are the important ones? Uh? And then we have to scale that to the skill of the golfer too, right, some golf golfer is going to be more repeable or not. Some golfers think, hey,
I'm not consistent enough for a custom fitting. Well, uh, you know you can lean on you know, static measurements of how your your your how tall you are, how long your arms are, how big your hands are, and so for the beginning golfer, somebody just getting into the game. That's why fitting is really important, is you can lean on the more fundamental things how golfer's built. Then you
fast forward to the most advanced golfers. When we're working with our tour players, you're getting really down into the weeds. That's when you might need to look at those more
advanced numbers. Maybe you're weaving in you know, teaching and fitting at the same time, and making sure that we're making changes to the equipment that their coach is kind of bought into because maybe they're working on a swing change to try to get them to deliver dynamically flat or reduce their rate of closure and things of that nature. So we need to scale our fitting processes to our customer.
Right your everyday golfer, beginning golfer, we might not need to get down into the weeds that much, but for you know, Victor or you know when we have you know, Boyd Summer, Hayes and Tony Final and we are getting into the weeds.
So I always think about like the first down line in football or shot tracer when you're watching golf on TV, and I think back to when I was initially getting fit, you know, years ago, and there was an entire bag of drivers, and there's an entire bag.
Of three woods.
What's been the biggest advance in technology in terms of fitting to help you guys out, In terms of explaining what's going on to the player in front of you.
Yeah, that's a great question, Shane. I think it's it's being able to pass on all those fitting levers that we could give to the tour players. Now your everyday golfer can get right.
When did that change? Like, when did that adjust from you come in and we kind of dot you to the right iron to now we can actually give you the same information that Tony Finale gets.
Yeah, it's kind of it's it's kind of been a gradual evolution. You know. I think back to when I first started. We had our tie aside close to twenty now, but we had our ti Asi metal woods that had different sleeves on them, and they had you could move the shaft around and be more upright, flatter and change the loft. Well, fast forward to you know, about ten
years after that, we started screwing in our hozzle. And what's fun about that is that it's really being able to pass along with the tour players had access to. So before we had that, let's say you had a G five G ten driver glueden hozzle. Well, if lee West would need a little less loft, guess what we would kind of trim the feral and shit, we call it shimming. We'd shim the shaft in to have a
little less loft. Well, you know, I think I view my role is to kind of take Hey, that access to the tour players have, let's pass that to the everyday golfer. And so then we designed our hozzle. Now the everyday golfer in the fitter could do that, so he unlocked all this little micro tweaking of loft. Well, fast forward to our G four ten driver. It's you know, hey, our tour players, some of them want to make the driver not go his left or eliminate the left side.
Well we put a little hot melt in the toe. Well what wasn't fair that your every day golfer couldn't do that, right, So that's when we brought in the CG shifter. So now when you go into the fitting environment, you can tweak, you can change shafts, you can micro tweak the loss in between your nine ten, five twelve, and you can change the center gravity of the club. So you can unlock all these variables. And again it's like that same level of access that literally our tour
players have access to. Now the every day golfer can get dialed in with their fitter.
You think it about fitting in terms of the equipment you have here at paying and then you think about the player when the player comes in, how important is it to fit them for how they play versus maybe how you want them to swing or how they want to swing.
Yeah, I think I think custom fitting is a lot about reducing, you know, the golfer from having to make compensations. Yeah, that's a good way to look at customs.
You're hitting a big So I'm hitting a big slice. I'm a fifteen handicap that slices it thirty yards and I keep hitting the slice and keep hitting the slice, and you're basically trying to make that same exact swing go less right exactly.
Yeah, And that's one of the advantages of now of our CG shifter is that you could look at that and be like, hey, that's kind of a band aid. If we put the center gravity in the heel, well, guess what, And our tour players do this all the time. You start changing your mechanics, working on your swing, getting
your path less over the top, et cetera. You can move that center CG shifter back to the neutral position, right That's one of the really fun advantages is of custom fitting and then having that little little bit of adjustability there in the fitting process. Marty.
What I think is so cool here at paying when I watch you guys go through your processes is you're using technology to make it easier on the player. And you think about coming in and getting fit for a putter, you think about going out to the driving range, and in theory you have three hours to get fit if you want it. But not everybody can swing every club
in their bag for three hours. You guys have leaned on technology to simplify that process, make it easier for somebody that maybe only has thirty minutes or forty five minutes or doesn't want to hit every club in the bag.
Yeah. Yeah, we've really tried to lean on our data. We have a team of data scientists and so we have a lot of algorithm.
Scientists are here. They're like one hundred scientists here.
I mean our engineering team is protest. Yeah, no, we're about eighty engineers, you know, between engineers, machinists, technician data scientists. Data science is a new thing, Like we didn't have data scientists five years ago, but now we have so much data we need to go in there and extract it and make sure we're doing meaningful things right. So we've developed a lot of tools in tech. I think, Shane exactly is what you talked about is if you want a full bag fitting, you'd be exhausted, right.
I mean it's almost half a day to come here and get fit through the bag because again you want to make sure everybody's comfortable wedge through driver.
Yep, exactly. So that full bag fit and a skilled fitter and we focus this a lot here is not going to allow that golfer to rake balls over whack a rake at, whack it and they're get tired, right. So a lot of times in that fitting experience we'll do very simple things like this. Golfers start to hit drivers and we will pull the golf balls away and start tossing to them like a tour player. So they're hitting one ball at a time. Okay, now why do we do that? It brings in more focus. We can
control the pace of them fitting. So if you can tell, oh, they're kind of drag them over whacking them, Hey, take a little breather, recalibrate, Hey, we're going to set you up in a game like fitting environment that we call it. See those poles out there, that's your fair way, you know, hit your natural shot. Or we'll create situational games like pretend you're on a reachable par five, you know, give me,
give me your swing there. I think when we were when we were working with you, even on irons, we had you hit different shots, hit your knockdown shot right, hit your stinger driver, what would you do if the wind's blowing? And so a really good fitting situation. We can put you in those encore simulations and make sure the club's going to be working for those scenarios.
And I know you guys have been working on technology, and I think this is really really smart because I'd say, as someone that observes golfers a lot, and obviously I don't live in your space, but the gapping is a big issue. And I mean even for professional golfers, gapping is an issue. I think would you call the bad area over two hundred yards? Say yeah, the tour players sat zone, planger zone if you're two hundred and two thirty.
Even for tour players, at times, they feel way less comfortable in that world because they're less clubs that they can go after and hit in that space. I know you guys have been working on technology to help you guys out in that world as well. For again, for someone that wants to come in get fit, doesn't have all data hit balls, and doesn't want to get exhausted going through the bag.
Yeah, exactly is We're developing and we have and we can continue to refine a tool called the Gapping app, which is which gives our fitters that ability to figure out what is the optimal set makeup for your bag And really you don't want to look at when you go to get fit. It's like, hey, I need to go get new irons. Well, that might impact how you gap your wedges. That might impact how you transition to
either hybrids or high lofted fairway woods. And that's one of the toughest problems to solve out there, because a golfer might not have a fitter in, a golfer might not have access to hit all those different clubs, see what they're going to do the time and energy to do that. So we're building more and more tools to predict how they would hit those clubs, and our predictions are getting more and more accurate. We're kind of feeding.
It's kind of like is real artificial intelligence. We're feeding our algorithms and our model with data from ping man player testing the fittings we do, and as we do that, the algorithms are getting smarter and smarter, and it scales for fast players like yourself, where you might end your bag at a four iron or some of our even faster players a twenty fee hour ending it at three iron, to your slower swing speed golfer that's going to start there in their irons at a seven iron and then
play six hybrid. So it's really fun. You can go in there and simulate, hey, how would that hybrid trajectory compared to a fairway wood. Some golfers prefer fairwywoods over hybrids or vice versa. Right, So you can do a lot of these what if experiments without exhausting the player, and quite frankly, we can actually do a better fit just having to get really good seven iron numbers than exhausting them and having them hit all these these fairwywoods and long irons and things of that nature.
What do you tell people that come in and go, Okay, I gotta get fit for my driver.
I love my driver.
Obviously, you know, it's the most fun club to hit in the bag. I want to get fit for my driver. I want to get fit for my woods, but maybe I don't want to spend too much time on my wedges or even you know, here in the putting lab with the putter, what do you say to people that are maybe focused a little bit more on the clubs that hit it far and maybe less on the clubs that don't.
Yeah, I think it's a good question. I mean, when you're part of the fitting process is to interview the golfer and get to know what's important to them, right, So I think it's it's our job to know, maybe statistically, what are the most important clubs in the bag, And candidly the driver is the most important, is the biggest
contribution to score. I'd men be a controversial thing because everyone's like, oh, you hit you know, you hit more shots with your putter, therefore it must be the most important. But the putter and the driver are close. It's almost tied for first of which is the most important for scoring. But the driver leads a little bit. So if it's that scenario, I mean, we one hundred percent support them.
Trying to get them dialed in on the driver because A it's fun and BA has the biggest contribution to scoring. But second with that is your putter right. And we see so many folks that in that scenario we would say, hey, just give me a few putts with your putter. Let's make sure you're in the right stroke type. So one of the lowest hanging fruit we see in putters is to match how somebody how much they rotate the face of the putter and make sure they're in the right balance.
So to simplify, it's, you know, either face balance or strong arc or tow down putter right. And so that's a simple way to kind of get in there. Provide some stats, Hey, this is how much putting contributes to your overall score of the game, and then we can do things like showcase performance. If it's wedges, hey let's just chip a few while you're warming up. Just chip a few here, and we can take a look at the grinds and see, hey, get you know, maybe they're
kind of steep. We'll give them a wide soul and they'll get that click, they'll get a little more turf protection, they won't fat one every once in a while, and so you can kind of subtly introduce the introduce those concepts if they're if they're kind of like, yeah, I don't want to look at my my wedges and my putter and some people a lot of people are intimidated by getting fit for wedges. Great, yep, right, it's a chipping can be a scary thing for a lot of golfers.
So a good fitter will empathize with the player and not too much put too much pressure on them, maybe have them hit a few while they're go assembling they're they're fitting their their seven iron interchangeable club or some of that nature. Very smart.
So you you know, you look at the technology that you guys have already and the stuff that you guys are about to introduce, and you talk about the gapping system, which I think is so smart, and it's so it's so innovative in terms of the technology you can lean on. How much more is there? You know, you feel like you kind of get to a point where what more can we do for the golfer at home?
I Shane, I think about that concept a lot. You know, It's like I think it'd be it's a very easy thing to kind of think, Hey, how much more can these companies do? Well, That's been the case for all twenty years years I've been here, Right, I think the reality is I think that there's this famous quote like, you know, the further you are from the shore, the
deeper the ocean, you know. And I think myself and my colleagues are very are more optimistic and excited about the future than ever, right, because we have both design innovation pathways that are very exciting to get more performance, and we have more advanced custom fitting tools. Right. And I go back to the tour players. They have access to shot link data. Okay, so their teams you know this, Shane. Their teams they have statisticians.
Literally about how they did week to week and quarter to quarter exactly.
They get reports. Look, they get a report when they show up to the course. A lot of them have a statistician. It's like this, how you should play this hole. You might want to put it in this different type of club. They look at the history of things, are constantly either instructing and or equipment working with our tour reps, maybe changing the club for a certain golf course. Right,
that's coming for the everyday golfer. Right, things like arcos they give the ability to measure that on course performance, and then with our data science team, we can go in there and take a look at that level of nuance to your everyday golfer and provide insights that they would just like a tour player might not be able to get themselves. So the future is very bright on that front.
I was at event a few weeks ago. It was an outpost event at Chicessi, and there was a guy there that was setting up his buddy's golf trip, and he's an analyst. He was doing data work on his laptop. He had all of his friends submit for the year their scorecards of how they played certain holes, and he would match players depending on how they'd play certain holes in all shot. And as I was looking at his computer, I was thinking, my friends don't do this, and maybe
eventually we'll get to this point. But I mean, again, there that's out there. I mean, you can obviously lean on this if you have the appropriate information and you know what you're doing. And like you said, we're going to get closer and closer to the tour player, probably sooner than later.
Yeah, we already have a solution for this. It's called My Game Insights. So if you're a member of our ping communities called ping Nation, you log in and you're you you've used Arcos for for uh three or three
or more rounds. You can go in there and connect uh your Arcos data into Ping and we have algorithms that will go in there and and look at your data and determine if you have a you know, a right miss tendency on your driver, determine if you have a gapping issue, and we'll provide those insights to you, the golfer, in very much the same way tour players do. So uh, if if you're an Arcos user uh and and and have our product, connect to your accounts and
check out my Game Insights. Is It's really cool. It's it's the uh it's the beginning of that journey.
Crazy. So a scary thing to always do, but we did it. I asked people on Twitter for some questions about thinking, so I went through and made sure I pulled the appropriate and I'm gonna start with this one, A very smart question. I've never thought about this for Philip asked general question about dealing with a fitter. Should you tip your fitter.
Oh man, I tell you what. Uh, If I would say this, maybe if you get your clubs and you're playing better golf, maybe reserve that tip until you're out there lowing your scores and and uh and your your clubs and your fitting lived up to it.
Wait till the food arrives. How you tipped the waiter?
I like that. It's very smart.
Do I this is a question I asked you a little bit about this. But do I get fit for the swing I have or the swing I'm trying to get to?
That's a great question. I think golfers should look at fitting as a never ending journey. Right, So, just like I talked about myself, I schedule a fitting at least once a year. Okay, I think your everyday golfer should kind of do the same, you know. Uh, But that is a that is a you know, a very great question. And I think just like we looked at a little bit when you were hitting your irons, uh, and you know you want to play that little cut. It's like, hey,
where should we go with this? Should we fit me into this color code that's going to embrace that or something that you can kind of change you know, lean into being more aggressive with your technique. So a lot of times you want to kind of go right in between. Okay uh, And that's again, like I talked about one of the advantages. Maybe you maybe you're a slice of the ball. Let's go ahead and put you in that CG shift to straighten it out in the in the
draw position. But as you work on your path, as you take lessons uh and improve your mechanics, you can now have that ability to change it yourself. So I think that question really depends on how much effort you're going to put put into working on your game, improving your swing, improving your mechanics, right, I think it comes down to that situation for that question.
There's like an open mindedness. I feel like that comes into this world, you know when you go when when you go to get fit, to have an to have an open mind to try stuff that you're you know you're probably not going to go with, but just to see what it does, to see how the ball flies, to see how much further you can hit a seven iron versus what you think you're probably going to get fit into. I feel like if you're going to go into this world, if you're gonna go to ping and
get fit, try everything. I mean, why not. You're there for a certain amount of time. I think it's worth at least seeing the different opportunities and options out there to see maybe again, even if you don't go this way, you can at least see what's available.
Yeah. No, I think that's a great that's a great point, Shane. We have a lot of golfers come in here. They have their mindset on, Hey, I want to play our blueprint and iron or I fifty blames and they'll leave with I two thirties and they love it. They love it. The feedback is fantastic. Or some players are I two thirties, they'll leave with our our you know, G four to thirty iron right and uh, and so that's a lot
of fun. I think that's a very good point. Be very open minded, uh when you go in for your fitting, because the very skilled and trained fitter will kind of spectrum you a little bit. They'll test you into different things. Right, They'll put you in a shaft that's too stiff, kind of on purpose, so you can kind of feel what that's like and then bring it and then bring it back.
A lot of questions about this, and we've covered it a little bit, but most golfers don't have a repeatable swing, you know, most golfer's handicaps. I'm assuming you're somewhere around fifteen without that. I've always wondered if fitting actually matters for those level players.
Yeah, I think fitting is a spectrum. So if you're a less skilled golfer, less repeatable golfer, you can lean on more static fitting. We call it right your build, your height, your wrist of floor. Ninety five percent of people fit into within plus or minus two degrees of their static fit using our color code system. So why is that important? If you're a less repeatable golfer and we give you the right color code based on your fitting based on how you're built, now you're going to
make less compensations as you work on your game. Okay. And then if you're a more advanced player, you might already know your lyingle and your color code. We can get down more into the weeds. So we want to have fitting solutions for both the less skilled player and the super lead advanced player.
I thought this was a great question from Ryan McCoy. He said, you know, there's so much data out there to look for. What are the questions you should be asking your fitter to make sure they're not just trying to present you with the newest, hottest equipment.
Yeah, no, that's an awesome question. So I think looking at dispersion is a big one. So I think we could break that into Okay, are you looking at your driver? Maybe your irons or your wedges? Right, So on a driver, you want to look at ball speed, not smash factor, because the launch monitor is all measure club ed speed a little bit differently. So we would make sure that we generally don't are not a fan of looking at
smash factor. Like ball speed is king and then you want to get to the right optimal launch and spin, and then you want to look at things like dispersion. And that's something very important for everyday golfer. Don't just look at your one single best hit, look at the grouping. So have your fit say, hey, what's my statu area look like? What's my consistency look like? There's these little numbers on most of the launch matters, it's called plus or minus. We are looking at that.
I think you're hitting a seven, so you're hitting seven and one fifty but you hit one one sixty. Look more at the consistency. Don't think you hit seven r on one sixty because you ripped one exactly.
You want to start looking at those groupings, how tight things are, How consistent is that spin in irons. It's a really big deal. Not just to look at distance. You want to look at peak height. You want to look at landing angle and we at ping. Provided all of our fitter is a really good guideline for what is a good spin rate. We see a lot of golfers out there that don't spin their irons enough. And it might look good when you're on the simulator, Hey I'm in this iron a mile, but when you go
to play golf, they can't stop it. They don't have good gapping and things of that nature. So looking at peak height, landing angle, dispersions, consistency of spin are really important factors.
I know you guys deal with both indoor and outdoor fittings. Can you talk about the benefits of both?
Yeah, definitely, I think outdoor if you have a chance to, I think outdoor is the best because you're hitting off turf. But the tools forgetting fit indoors have gotten way better even in the last couple of years. Right now, there's golf balls that radar companies give it more signal to noise ratio like the RCT ball and things of that nature that can provide better ballistic data for indoor fit.
Right I think one of the important things in an indoor fitting is kind of getting that lingle right, so you want to look at the spin axis of the shot. That's kind of a final thing that you want to look at outdoor fitting. You know, if you have a launch monitor that's measuring the full down range fight, that's a big benefit. But obviously not every facility has premium golf balls, so you're having to rely on the launch monitor to predict the flight. So I think we've come
a long way. The industry has come a long way. Some of the tools we've built to do things like gapping. We've built some great tools for wedge fitting to upgrade the ability to do a good wedge fitting indoors. I think that's one of the biggest challenges in wedges. You want to get the timing of the sole interaction to the golf ball and the acoustics. We can even do things,
and I think some great fitting facilities do this. You can evaluate how effective the grooves are on your wedges by introducing just a little moisture between the ball and the club face. So we'll do this here, which is quite fun, is have somebody bring in their gamer wedges and we'll say, okay, well there's outdoors. There's gonna be water and grass out there, so we're gonna do a little simulation. We'll just put a little sprits of water on the ball or the clubhead. You hit it and
measure the spin. And quite often, let's say they're spinning their wedges like eight thousand, you put a little moisture there, their gamer wedges will drop in half. They'll spin like four thousand. But then you hit our glide four point zeros in our latest wedges, you put that water on there, the spin will stay exactly the same. So that's a way that you can simulate outdoor conditions indoors, which is quite fun.
Yeah, you were telling me that basically every shot on grass has moisture. Basically every golf shot you hit on grass, when you guys really break it down frames per second, you're always going to see some level of moisture come up.
Yeah, not quite frankly, Shan, that was surprising, Like we had to use a you know, a high speed camera that was measuring like ten thousand frames a second.
You guys have a camera that is one hundred thousand frames.
For exactly but it was crazy. I mean, we had stand Utley and I mean one of the best short games of all time, and he's hitting pitch shots on a dry summer day out here and we're just getting some video with his camera. See how he's delivering, and look at all the microphysics of what's going on. And we opened up that video and while the club is approaching the ball, it's kind of landing on the grass, it's clipping the grass, so little clippings are coming up
and getting on the face. This is before you make impact with the ball, and you could see the water droplet's getting squeezed out and getting between the ball and the club face. And he's like, yeah, I pured that chip. It's like a perfectly good chip. And so that really was an eye opener. Yes, anytime, except if you're hitting a ball off a tee, there's gonna be some level of debris.
Or even iron off a t even if you're just it's just like a little nod there.
Uh yeah, I guess if yeah, an iron off a tee, if you were to kind of brush the grass a little bit. So it's going to depend on your angle patch a little bit. But yeah, there's gonna be in there, and that's why the gurus and the finish and things of that nature. But going back to your question about indoor fitting, you can introduce that to evaluate. Hey, I think I mean me, as a golfer, I want my spin to be the same with regardless of the conditions,
because then you're gonna have that more predictability. And that shot that the tour players hate is that you're hitting that pitch shot and it slides up the face, right. Oh, they hate that.
I mean, we all hate that all terrible. Max Davis had a good question about shaft selection. It's one of the biggest factors in getting properly fit, yet it might as well be rocket science for most people. How can people be made aware of the importance without bogging them down in terms of the specifics when you talk about shafts.
Yeah, shaft fitting is tough because it's very individual. How players, thousands of them. I mean, there's thousands of different options exactly. So yeah, we've tried to simplify this. I think the high level on schaft hitting is that your clubhead speed get you in the ballpark for what flex to play, But how you transition it, uh in that change of direction is really a key to making sure you're gonna
love the feel of that shaft. Shane, I'm sure you've kind of had had some shafts in your life that have been maybe a little stiffer in the butt section that you like because of how you transition it right, kind of a little more aggressive transition, uh than a louiou stays in or somebody somebody of.
That don't swing it like Louis Well, you just you use.
So transition a little bit different than you know. But
I think that's the key to shafts. So we we've had designed a bunch of fitting charts that we provided to our fitting network that says, Okay, if your transitions like this, your your your swing speeds like this, and then the question is do you do you need to use the shaft to hit the ball a little bit higher a little bit lower and provide really good decision matrix there and then We have another app we've made you know, more apps and software called the Shaft App
that our fitters have access to to make the complex easy. It it data minds through all the shafts that we've measured here at the proving grounds on our equipment, and then it it marries it to algorithms that we've developed through our motion capture system and all the fittings that we do at the proving grounds. In it provides the top three shafts that you should start with and try right, and we kind of use that as your starting point
in the fitting process to break through. I agree. I mean keeping up with all the shafts out there and reading up on them and figure out this is supposed to do this, this is supposed to do that. I got to try all these million shafts. We want to make the complex simple. Let's boil that down to the top three, go try them and kind of iterate from there.
It feels like that's the theme here is the information is abundant. I mean, we've talked about it. There's so much stuff out there that we can learn about every single golf swing. And what you guys at PING are really trying to do is to make it as simplified as humanly possible for somebody coming in. And that's shafts, and that's wedges, and that's putting, and that's gapping, and
that's everything. It's how can we put it on a one sheet and you can actually look at it and understand it and don't need a PhD to understand it.
Yeah, exactly. And things have gotten a lot more complex from the days where we just made an eye to iron and to fit everybody right. Now we have irons that have totally different loft configurations. We have irons where the face flexes a lot, irons where the face is more stable. So those those little gapping scenarios become very nuanced. For example, our G four to thirty hybrids they go long ways. So in our algorithms, in our recommendations, we
see this a lot. On the LPGA tour is we'll have some gals who are playing a five iron and then they play a five hybrid, and that's not a mistake. It's because our G four to thirty hybrid goes far. It's meant to gap with the G four thirty irons, But if you're playing the I two thirty iron, it is totally fine to play a five iron in a five hybrid, right, Those are going to provide good gapping. And that's because those irons go very different distances, very different trajectories.
So basically summarizing all this, get fit is what you're telling me.
Make sure you get fit. Yeah, get fit. I think the big thing is don't be intimidated. I think it can be very intimidating or to have in your head, Hey I'm not good enough to get fit. Well, I mean it's even if you're you're just getting into the game. You want to get those those macro level specs, the length, the color code based on your body type. So you're
not making compensations as you're working on your game. Okay, So even if you have those thoughts in your head, you know, don't be intimidated by the process and make sure you get fit regardless of your skill level. And we're going to have different levels of fitting offered by trained to our fitting network depending on your on your skill, and we're going to scale the complexity as you get better at this game.
What do you guys ask players before they come in or is there something you can fill out? You tell them what type of player you are, handicap misses things like that.
Yeah, absolutely, so yeah, we we we ask players about where they play golf. Do you travel a lot or not? You know, some golfers play the same course most of the time. Others are travel around playing a variety of different conditions. Uh, that's a big factor where you live. I mean, we fit golfers that fly in from Denver aspen Veil, and they need totally different fittings than a
golfer lives here or lives at sea level. The wind's gonna affect it differently, there's gonna be different lift and drags, so your environmental conditions are are quite different. And then, Shane, this is really fun. If a golfer is keeping track of their stats, uh, specifically arcos, we can look at their data before the history before they arrive, before they get here and and uh and we'll have findings uh and and insights from their game before they get here
to get a major jump start. And again that's exactly like tour players are fit right there.
Okay, so I have a three and a half year old son. How early is how early should I be getting Henry fit? Like now, now, get them dialed get them in, get him fring them down, and let's go.
Three a half is the age. That's a good example of At that age, we might not need to measure his transition type. We need to know how tall he is. Okay, that's good to know.
So as we summarize get fit, pay attention to everything, be open minded, and be excited about you're getting new clubs. When that box arrives, it's your golf clubs. It is like one of the great feelings for a golfer in this world is when you actually have stuff that you spend time getting fit for that you know is specific for your golf swing and your swing speed, and you get to take that out and really use it and then see how effective it is.
Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I still get excited when I and I'm and I got and I got a new five wood, you know, half inch short, our new tow or two point oh black. You know, I got the housle position, a certain setting. I'm like, I love that feeling the ping box at the front door.
I mean, you're talking next level excitement. It's adult Christmas all the time. It's like when you go on that first day on the golf trip It's like when you land and have the first drink and you go, I finally made it. I got a seven with the other day, and I was very excited about that.
I'm Shade Baking.
That is Marty Jertsen and this is the Ping Proving Grounds podcast