You know when you get that feeling that the next golf season is yours for the taking? I really feel that way about my golf game in 2026.
A handful of my colleagues and I just returned home from a week-plus of testing Club 2026 offerings from top manufacturers in Carlsbad, California, and Phoenix—and, boy, am I excited.
In fact, I feel so confident that my 2026 batch will take my game to the next level that I’m finally starting to pin qualifying for the US Intermediate Amateur. (It doesn’t hurt that next year’s event will be held in Sand Valley’s Spectacular Lido Course.)
As the equipment editor here at GOLF, I already had a well-optimized setup for my game, and yet I expect to change every club in my bag next season – except for my mini driver, putter and potentially my hybrid. This is after getting our hands on the latest hardware and carefully testing just my driver setup.
Now I am confident that I will have a set of clubs that will mitigate my dreaded lefty loss while also allowing me to easily hit any shot I want without having to “make it work”. In a video we’ll be releasing early next year, you’ll see a great example of how I get my current driver to work vs. working for me.
Essential to our testing process were the incredibly talented assemblers I was lucky enough to work with: Bryan Rourke at Ping; Chandler Carr and Brandon Dooley at TaylorMade; Louis Raynard at Titleist; Andrew Lusty at Cobra; and Gerritt Pon at Callaway. Together, they help me find new grinds for wedges, different shaft profiles for my woods, and irons related to loft/lie specs.
So much amazing new technology is coming and I’m dying to tell you all about it – but I can’t yet! What I can tell you is that 2026 can’t get here soon enough.
3 things I’m thinking
TaylorMade and Ping are coming in 2026: While I cannot go into detail about my experiences with TaylorMade Qi4D driver and Ping G440K yetI will say that these two clubs are already hot in the global tournament. TaylorMade has its top dogs (Scottie, Rory and Tommy) the game of its young leaders even before the start of 2026, in addition to a host of other professionals in various tournaments. Meanwhile, Ping has also seen strong adoption of its G440K driver; Lauren Coughlin just won with it on Sunday at the Grant Thornton Invitational.
Is the Cobra mini driver finally coming? Lexi Thompson was spotted with a new Cobra King Tec MD Mini driver at Grant Thornton. Could this be the long-awaited Cobra mini-driver that we’ve been seeing prototypes of since late last year? Images shared by GolfWRX appear to show finished cosmetics and no mention of “prototype”.
What is Jason Day waiting for? We used the same headline a few weeks ago in this space – and it still applies! In October, Day debuted a set of prototype Avoda irons in his bag. He didn’t play again until Grant Thornton last week and came armed with not only a new set of Avoda prototypes, but also a seven-year-old TaylorMade M5 driver, which to this day is my favorite driver I’ve ever owned. (It’s also the driver Tiger Woods played in the 2019 Masters.) Day is cooking up some cool stuff for 2026, and I’m 100 percent here for it.
