The gear we use to test your equipment: an overview of the gear behind our annual club and shooting test and why each earns its place.
We’ve covered the devices after our testing before. But every year, more golfers discover MyGolfSpy and with that comes a new round of questions about how we do what we do and what we use to do it.
Near the top of that list, every time: What equipment do we use when testing and why instead of something else?
The honest answer is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This list doesn’t come back often. When a tool earns its place in our program, it tends to keep it. Still, enough has changed, and enough of you are new here, that it was a good time to walk through the current recap.
A little quick context before we get to it. None of this works without the object. The building, the bays, the controlled environment in which we test … this is the foundation on which everything else rests. But the foundation is not the story today. This is specifically about club testing, so maybe we’ll talk about Ball Lab and bot testing later.
With that, here is the summary.
Good testing is primarily an exercise in killing variables. Anything you can keep constant, you keep constant, so that when a number moves, you know the club moved it and not something else.
The golf ball belongs on that list even if it isn’t always treated that way. We tend to think of a premium ball as a known quantity, but years of working in the Ball Lab and on the robot have taught us that the ball is often more of a variable than it reasonably should be. So for every club and putter test we do, we use the same ball: Titleist Pro V1.
The robot likes it. between generations, For V1 has proven as consistent as anything we’ve put forward and it continues to clear our quality bar. We’ve run eight different models from the Pro V1 family through Ball Lab over the years (For V1Pros V1x, Left dash) and throughout that sample exactlya ball our checks failed. That’s a defect rate of 0.35 percent, well below our database average.
It doesn’t hurt that the Pro V1 is the no. 1 on both the PGA Tour and at retail, which means almost every golfer reading this has hit one. When the control in your experiment is also the ball most of your audience plays, that’s about as good a baseline as you’ll find.
Shooter testing used to be the part of the program that I would have told you was the hardest to get right. Rolling the same putt from the same spot a hundred times tells you something, but it doesn’t tell you much about how a putter performs when the putts actually change, meaning how they change on a real green.
our custom PuttView green changed it. Instead of tracking a hammer putt on replay, we can build a putting course that does a much better job of replicating what you actually face on the course: different lengths, different breaks, the whole mix.
The top camera system is the other half of it. It gives us accurate miss distances and tracks percentages at every distance we test, so we’re not looking at whether a putt ended up close. We have the number.
From there, the system converts the strokes gained into a putting handicap. Strokes Gained is the right currency, but it’s not the most intuitive thing for most players. It is a handicap. The same data, translated into a language that most of us already speak.
We do our club testing indoors and for an environment like ours I don’t think there is a better launch monitor than the GCQuad forecast. The data is consistent, it’s accurate, and it continues to get more powerful as Foresight adds metrics to the platform.
The basics are the basics: how fast, how far, how close. of GCQuad give us all. But the part that earns its keep is the club data. By capturing what the head is doing through impact, we can move past “which club went the farthest” and begin to identify which clubs are more likely to suit a certain type of swing. This is a big part of what makes our testing useful for you and not just us.
As the Foresight platform grows, so does what we are able to measure and track. More on that when the time is right.
It would be easy to move right across the impact surface as part of the test rig. It’s a mattress. You hit balls out of it. How much can it really matter?
More than you think.
of SIGPRO Softy it gives us realistic performance on the freeway. It’s durable, it’s soft, and it allows us to test every category of club we throw at it. This last part is not given. There are mats on the market that make it nearly impossible to cleanly hit wide-heeled clubs, especially fairway woods, and good luck hitting one off the deck. This is not hypothetical for us. A few years ago, we had to replace every mat in our previous facility after we found that most of our testers couldn’t hit the fairway woods clean. You cannot perform a reliable fairway wood test on a surface that fights the club.
Gentleness matters for another reason. Testers take a lot of swings, and a surface with some sway keeps them swinging without beating their joints. Small details like this are the links of a test program. You don’t notice them until one of them silently destroys a data set. Softy avoids them.
Same story, different surface. You probably wouldn’t think an impactful display makes much of a difference, but we need two things from ours, and we need both in large quantities.
The first is a clear picture. The second is durability, because our screens take a beating. We’re talking about 100,000 shots a year, nearly 20,000 of them at the speed of the driver. That’s a brutal load on a piece of fabric, and most screens aren’t built for it.
When we built the new facility, we tried a number of options before settling on it SIGPRO. It holds up to everything we’ve asked of it, which after many speed bumps from the driver is a sentence I didn’t necessarily expect to write.
That’s the list… for now
If there’s a theme here, it’s that none of these devices stand out. It’s not supposed to be. A test tool’s job is to be consistent, to get out of the way and let the devices we’re testing tell the truth for themselves. Boringin this context, it’s a compliment.
The list will change again. It always does, even when it mostly doesn’t. When it does, you’ll be the first to know.
More questions?
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