Just when it looks like golf equipment manufacturers have have run out of ideas, a handful of new ideas seem to pop up out of nowhere. Admittedly, some are better than others, but last year has been a particularly good year for fans of innovative golf gear so in this video, Joe Ferguson runs through the five golf gear trends from last year that he thinks are here to stay!
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00As an equipment tester, innovation in the golf industry never fails to surprise me. Just when
00:05you think they've invented everything, something new comes out. Now, some of these innovations are
00:10better than others, and some stand the test of time. 2024 has been a particularly good year for
00:15innovation, so in this bag, I've got five gear trends that I think are here to stay.
00:22Okay, mini drivers. Now, you might be thinking, that's not a new gear trend, Joe, and you're
00:26probably right. TaylorMade have been making their variations of it for a few years, but what I'm
00:31talking about is it's really picked up momentum in 2024. Players like Mickelson have been using one
00:37for a while. Tommy Fleetwood loves his mini driver. Even Rory McIlroy was testing earlier in the year,
00:42and the two models I've got here are the TaylorMade Burner Copper mini driver, and I've got the new
00:47AI Smoke mini driver from Callaway. Now, they do two quite different things, but they're both
00:52very versatile. Now, a lot of people get confused about what the mini driver is for,
00:57and I think it's very, very player dependent. As a PGA professional, I've started to see a lot of my
01:02peers popping a mini driver in tournaments where things tighten up a little bit as a pure driver
01:08alternative, and some people might think that's not a great idea. With a higher handicap, you might
01:12want that extra shaft length to get your speed up, and you might want the extra head size to use as a
01:16driver. Well, in that instance, you can think about it as a large, friendlier three-wood. The
01:22footprint's a lot bigger, which I'll show you in a second. If I put down the TaylorMade mini driver
01:26there, in behind the ball, that feels like double the size of a standard three-wood. Now, both of
01:32these models come in 11.5 and 13.5 degree options, and you can loft them up on the loft sleeve, so you
01:38can actually get them to a pretty standard three-wood loft, and you've just got a tiny bit of extra shaft
01:43length, and you've got that extra mass behind the ball. I think this trend is here to stay, and for
01:49me, as a higher speed player, I see it as that driver alternative. I've got mine at 11.5, lofted down
01:56just a fraction, just a shade over 10.5, and on tight holes like this, I find it really, really useful,
02:06a nice penetrating ball flight, and it helps me find a lot more fairways, and I think this is a trend
02:11that's here to stay. Another gear trend that I think is here to stay, in fact, no, I'm going to
02:17go a step further, I think is the future of putters, is lie-angle balance. Now, I've got with me here
02:23the LabGolf DF3 putters, and LabGolf are the early adopters of lie-angle balance. It's their name,
02:30Lab, L-A-B, lie-angle balance. What is a lie-angle balance putter, I hear you ask? Well, you might have
02:36heard the term toe, hang, and face balance before. Lie-angle balance putters sit kind of with the
02:40toe up. If I don't touch that shaft, and I leave it to orientate itself, you see how the toe of the
02:45putter stays up? That is lie-angle balance. If you've seen any of the social media stuff from LabGolf
02:50in their revealer, that orientation allows the club face to stay square to the par throughout the
02:57stroke without any manipulation, and that's something I really, really like. I think in years to come,
03:02people are actively going to wonder why we ever manufactured putters that wanted to actively
03:07rotate away from square to the target. In my head, that doesn't make much sense. Tiger likes it, but
03:13Tiger's a particularly special athlete that I think maybe we shouldn't all necessarily model ourselves
03:18on. For me, it really simplifies things if the putter blade wants to stay square. When you're on
03:24short putts in particular, assuming you've got the right read and the right alignment, that putter blade
03:29just wants to stay square to the target. It doesn't want to rotate away from square, and that really
03:34helps with your start line. It's something I'm really passionate about, and I genuinely think that
03:39is the future of putting, and that is a gear trend that's here to stay.
03:43Okay, while we are on the putting green, I've got another gear trend for you to do with putting that
03:48I think is here to stay from 2024. Those of you who listen to the Kickpoint Golf Gear podcast from
03:54Golf Monthly, well, now I've got a bit of a weird fascination with grips, and this is to do with
03:58the putter grips. In my hand, I've got the Golf Pride reverse taper grips. These were released this
04:04year, and to me, it just makes perfect sense. We spend a lot of time with putting technically trying
04:11to remove that bottom hand from the game, trying to slow it down and give it less power over the
04:16stroke, but we've been using grips for years that are either tapering from wider to thinner down to
04:22the bottom end, which tends to give that right hand or the lower hand in your putting stroke more
04:26power, or we're using perfectly parallel grips, which companies like Super Stroke have been doing
04:31for some time, which has really, really helped, but Golf Pride this year have engineered a reverse
04:36taper grip. In fact, they've engineered three reverse taper fits. We've got the round, we've got the pistol,
04:41and we've got the flat, and they go the opposite way, as you can imagine. Thinner at the top, and they get
04:46thicker down the bottom, and when you think about it, if we've got something thicker in that bottom
04:50hand, most of us know that thicker grips tend to deactivate hands a little bit, so when we've got
04:56something thicker in the bottom hand, that's got to be good for our stroke. Obviously, these aren't
05:01on a putter, but I've tested these out quite significantly, and I've had some really, really
05:05good results, and I've actually got one on my game of putter at the moment, so I feel like I can talk
05:09with some authority on the topic. It really does quieten down that bottom hand. It's really helping me
05:15hit my start lines more often, and again, I think this is a gear trend that's going to be with us
05:18for a long, long time. I've come down the fairway here off that lovely mini driver t-shirt, one of
05:24my other trends, to talk to you about another trend that I think is here to stay, and that is full-face
05:29grooves. Now, we've seen full-face grooves for a number of years on wedges, like the tailor-made
05:35high-toe wedges, various Callaway iterations, but not so much on irons, and I think it is something
05:43that we really need to consider. I've got with me here the Cleveland Halo XL full-face irons. Now,
05:49when you first look at it, it is a visual that takes a little bit of getting used to, but when
05:54you dig into it, you dig into the science and the tech behind it, it makes perfect sense. Firstly,
05:59from a spin point of view, why would you not want to standardize the spin on heel and toe strike?
06:05Sometimes, if you hit a very extreme toe strike on an iron and you're hitting no grooves,
06:09you're going to get a very strange low-spinning flight, so why would you not extend those grooves
06:14all the way to the edge of the face? Secondly, we're always looking to save weight in irons. Now,
06:21there's not going to be masses of saving just by milling extra grooves from there to the edge of
06:25the club, but there will be some, and every little milligram you can save in the club head can be
06:30redistributed elsewhere to increase MOI and put the CG where you want it. Now, for me, again, like I've
06:37said, it's been in wedges for a little while, but I don't know why it's not across the board
06:41commonplace. When you think about it, it makes no sense. Why would we ever stop the grooves there?
06:46I think sometimes in golf, we're very much victims of just accepting things how they've always been
06:51and not questioning it. For me, and I'm just going to hit one away for you here, the full face grooves in
06:57irons is something I think is here to stay. Also, I think it's going to be across the board commonplace in
07:06wedges before too long. Another trend that is 100% here to stay are 3D printed golf clubs,
07:15and Cobra have been leading the way on this front. They've had putters out for a little while,
07:19and what I've got in my hands here is a beautiful Cobra limited 3D printed iron.
07:25Now, 3D printing has been used a lot in prototyping, speeding up the prototyping process and people
07:31checking out what designs they're going to bring to market, but this is really the first consumer
07:35available 3D printed iron. I've tested this quite extensively and the feel is extraordinary. I'm not
07:41going to get into all of the tech because that's for another video, but basically what Cobra have
07:45done here is they've created a player looking iron with about as much game improvement technology as in
07:51any other club I've ever tried. It's quite extraordinary. If Bryson DeChambeau is to believe,
07:57and this is quite a terrifying thought, before too long, 3D printers at home, you could be sat there with an
08:02idea in your head watching the golf, head to your garage and you could be prototyping your very own
08:07irons and wedges before too long and have them almost hittable within a day or so, pop a shaft on
08:12and go and test out a new concept down the golf course. Now, that's a terrifying thought for some
08:17of my friends who've got some really wacky ideas, but it's also exciting for the innovation in the golf
08:23industry. I think that's something to keep an eye on moving forward. If the feel of these is anything to go by...
08:28Then we're in for a really nice treat in the future with some of these 3D printed golf clubs.