This past weekend I had the opportunity to spend a day and a half with Dana Upshaw, Dana Golf in Warner Robins, GA. Dana is acknowledged as one of the premier clubfitters in the world, and I did all I could to soak up as much knowledge as possible from him.
One of the things that I watched him doing during a fitting was to measure the loft of the driver for the player he was fitting. Pretty standard stuff, but also pretty important to understanding club performance. He has been collecting data on real versus marked driver lofts for awhile now, and most often the true measured loft of the club is not what is marked on it – sometimes by a few degrees.
This matters because – for example – you might really be playing a driver with either too much or too little loft. This happened on Friday, when the player Dana was fitting wondered why he was hitting his driver too high – and Dana found out that the loft of the driver was a few degrees more than expected.
I started a similar effort tonight, to start collecting data on driver lofts. For my first opportunity I measured the loft of what was supposed to be a 9.5 degree driver, and found it to be 11 degrees. More data on this effort will be reported in the future!
Tony