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The sequence, and why it is in this orderOn the Bench
A fitting is a process of removing variables. Do it in the wrong order and you spend the session chasing results that keep moving. Here is how ours is arranged.
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Fifteen minutes of talking, no clubs
Which courses you play, how often, what your typical miss looks like, whether anything hurts, and what you actually want from the session. This is not small talk — a player who plays twice a month on a firm municipal course needs a different build than one who plays four times a week at a watered club, and the difference is bigger than most equipment differences.
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Static measurements, recorded on paper
Height in your golf shoes. Wrist-to-floor from the crease in the wrist, taken three times and averaged. Glove span across the palm and along the middle finger. Forearm length. Then a photograph of your natural address posture from face-on and down the line. These are the numbers that set the starting window for length, lie and grip build.
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Your own clubs, measured as they arrived
Before you hit anything we put your existing clubs on the gauge: loft, lie, length, swingweight and total mass, club by club. This takes about twenty minutes for a full set and it is the step most shops skip. Without it, there is no way to know whether the improvement you feel later came from the new component or simply from correcting something the old set had drifted into.
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Sole tape and the lie board
Tape goes on, and you hit shots off the board with your own clubs. We discard fat and thin strikes and keep reading until six clean ones exist per club. The board tells us where the sole met the ground; combined with your dispersion pattern it tells us whether your current geometry is helping or being worked around.
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Geometry fixed, then components
Length and lie get locked in first — if that means bending your existing clubs mid-session, we do it there and then. Only after the geometry is settled do we start swapping heads and shafts, one variable at a time, holding everything else constant. Testing two changes at once produces a result you cannot attribute to anything.
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The numbers, used as confirmation
The launch monitor runs through the whole session but we treat it as a referee rather than a judge. Thin air at this elevation inflates carry, and any single swing can lie to you. What we look at is the tightness of the pattern, the repeatability of strike location on face tape, and whether the trend across ten swings agrees with what the board showed.
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The build sheet
Every session ends with a printed sheet: head model, shaft, tip trim, playing length, loft, lie, swingweight, grip model, core size and tape wraps, for every club discussed. You keep it. A copy stays on file here so a future regrip or reshaft can be matched exactly, even years later.
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If we build it, it goes back on the board
Finished clubs are re-measured against the sheet before you collect them, and you are welcome to hit them on the board before taking them home. Anything outside tolerance gets corrected before it leaves the shop, not after you complain about it.
What to bring, and what not to worry about
Bring your clubs, your golf shoes and a glove if you wear one. Wear something you can swing in. That is the whole list.
You do not need to be striking the ball well. A session run on an off day is still informative, because we are measuring tendencies rather than best-case performance. If you genuinely cannot make contact on the day — it happens — we stop, you pay nothing, and we rebook.
You do not need to know your swing speed, your handicap or anything about shafts. That is our job.
The follow-up is part of the fitting
Six to eight weeks after a build we ask you to come back for twenty minutes on the board, at no charge. New clubs change how a player delivers them, and the geometry that was right on day one is occasionally half a degree off once the swing settles around the new specification.
Most players need nothing. The ones who do would otherwise have spent a season quietly compensating again, which is exactly the situation the fitting was supposed to end.