AskMyGolfSpy: The Equipment We Use To Test Your Equipment

The gear we use to test your gear: a rundown of the tools behind our annual club and putter testing and why each one earns its place.

We’ve covered the equipment behind our testing before. But every year, more golfers discover MyGolfSpy and with that comes a fresh 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 during testing and why that instead of something else?

The honest answer is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This list doesn’t turn over often. When a tool earns its spot in our program, it tends to keep it. Still, enough has changed, and enough of you are new around here, that it felt like a good time to walk through the current rundown.

A quick bit of context before we get to it. None of this works without the facility. The building, the bays, the controlled environment we test in … that’s the foundation everything else sits on. But the foundation isn’t the story today. This one is specifically about club testing so maybe we’ll talk about Ball Lab and robot testing later.

With that, here’s the rundown.

Titleist Pro V1

Good testing is largely an exercise in killing variables. Anything you can hold constant, you hold 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 doesn’t always get treated that way. We tend to think of a premium ball as a known quantity but years of work in 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 run, we use the same ball: Titleist Pro V1.

The robot loves it. Across generations, the Pro V1 has proven about as consistent as anything we’ve put in front of it and it keeps clearing our quality bar. We’ve run eight different models from the Pro V1 family through Ball Lab over the years (Pro V1, Pro V1x, Left Dash) and across that entire sample exactlyone ball failed our checks. 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 ball both on the PGA Tour and at retail which means nearly 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’re going to find.

PuttView putting green

Putter testing used to be the part of the program I’d have told you was hardest to do well. 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 vary which is to say, how they vary on a real green.

Our custom PuttView green changed that. Instead of hammering one putt on repeat, we can build a putting course that does a far better job of replicating what you actually face out on the course: different lengths, different breaks, the whole mix.

The overhead camera system is the other half of it. It gives us precise miss distances and tracks make percentages across every distance we test so we’re not eyeballing whether a putt finished close. We have the number.

From there, the system converts Strokes Gained into a putting handicap. Strokes Gained is the right currency but it’s not the most intuitive thing for most golfers. A handicap is. Same data, translated into a language more of us already speak.

Foresight GCQuad launch monitor

We do our club testing indoors and for an environment like ours, I don’t think there’s a better launch monitor than the Foresight GCQuad. The data is consistent, it’s accurate, and it keeps getting more robust as Foresight adds metrics to the platform.

The basics are the basics: how fast, how far, how close. The GCQuad gives us all of it. But the part that earns its keep is the clubhead data. By capturing what the head is doing through impact, we can move past “which club went farthest” and start identifying which clubs are more likely to suit a given swing type. That’s a big part of what makes our testing useful to you and not just to us.

As the Foresight platform grows so does what we’re able to measure and pass along. More on that when the time is right.

SIGPRO Softy Mat

It would be easy to scroll right past the hitting surface as a piece of testing equipment. It’s a mat. You hit balls off it. How much can it really matter?

More than you’d think.

The SIGPRO Softy gives us realistic fairway performance. It’s durable, it’s soft, and it lets us test every club category we throw at it. That last part isn’t a given. There are mats on the market that make it nearly impossible to hit wide-soled clubs cleanly, fairway woods especially, and good luck hitting one off the deck. That’s not a hypothetical for us. A few years back, we had to replace every mat in our former facility after discovering that most of our testers couldn’t hit clean fairway woods off them. You can’t run a credible fairway wood test on a surface that fights the club.

The softness matters for a different reason. Testers take a lot of swings and a surface with some give keeps them swinging without beating up their joints. Small details like that are the tripwires of a testing program. You don’t notice them until one of them quietly ruins a data set. The Softy avoids them.

SIGPRO impact screen

Same story, different surface. You probably wouldn’t guess an impact screen makes much 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 north of 100,000 shots a year, nearly 20,000 of them at driver speed. That’s a brutal workload for a piece of fabric and most screens aren’t built for it.

When we built the new facility, we tried a handful of options before landing on the SIGPRO. It’s held up to everything we’ve asked of it which after that many driver-speed shots is a sentence I didn’t necessarily expect to be writing.

That’s the list … for now

If there’s a theme here, it’s that none of this gear is flashy. It’s not supposed to be. The job of a testing tool is to be consistent, get out of the way and let the equipment we’re testing tell the truth about itself. Boring, in this context, is 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?

Got a question for a future edition of AskMyGolfSpy? Pass it along to the team on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or right here in the comments section below.

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