Custom club fitter taps into technological advances to upgrade your game
(Willowbrook, IL) — Club Champion is not your father’s club fitter. Back in the day, a professional club fitter would apply tape to your club head and have you hit off a lie angle board. They’d eyeball your swing and suggest a change in the stiffness of your shaft, or maybe a different grip. They may have even had a swing speed meter, but that was the extent of technology’s role in the fittings of the past. Today, premium fitter Club Champion taps into the 21st century from every conceivable angle to deliver a truly professional, truly modern custom golf club fitting.
If you walk into any of the 62 Club Champion fitting studios nationwide, you’ll see the touches of modern technology everywhere. The fitting bays and putting greens are outfitted with radar-based TrackMan launch monitors, computers and ultrasound putting systems. The demo walls are lined with club heads and shafts that can be combined using a proprietary coupling system, allowing golfers to test over 35,000 hittable combinations in real time. Even the pre-fitting interview is aided by a tablet. Make no mistake that you’re in a modern golf mecca.
“We’re the best at what we do because we exhaust every tool available in the club fitting world,” says Club Champion founder and master club fitter Nick Sherburne. “You can’t get our proven results without being a bit of a golf geek, and our fitting technology takes us to that next level.”
Pardon the pun, but it’s fitting that a company like Club Champion would utilize every advancement available. Their business model is built in part on offering the latest and greatest in golf club technology, and club manufacturers are living in their own futuristic world. Titanium and other space-age materials are making their way into club construction. Robots, wind tunnels and now artificial intelligence are used to help design and test clubs before they ever see the light of a trade show floor or retailer shelf. To truly take advantage of these developments, fitters and builders have to be able to analyze and understand every element of a golfer’s swing, and be able to match the player to the club component.
TrackMan swing analysis, the gold standard of launch monitors, can be found in every Club Champion fitting bay. It is the same system the PGA Tour uses to show a pro’s ball flight on TV and to track hitting statistics. Club Champion uses it to take precise club and ball measurements in a controlled environment. One radar system tracks everything the club does before, during, and after impact, measuring parameters like club path, face angle and even swing direction and spin loft. The secondary radar system tracks the ball flight from launch to landing. Measurements there include launch angle, spin rate and curvature. Dual Radar Technology is a significant milestone in the evolution of custom fitting.
The flat stick gets its own system, called SAM (Science and Motion) PuttLab. This ultrasound-based system analyzes the 28 most important parameters of a putting stroke then displays the results in graphic reports. Within seconds, the system delivers individualized feedback and reports on even the smallest details of a putting stroke like putter path, face aim, rotation, tempo, impact spot, face angle and more. The ultrasound sensory analysis makes SAM much more precise than any other system on the market. The principle is based on measuring the travel time signals of three sensors, whose calculation of the exact positions in space makes it possible to derive movement data. Each relevant putter parameter is diagnosed in an interactive step-by-step process. The software provides automatic data analysis, allowing master fitters to determine the best recommendations for putter head shape, grip, length, loft, lie, balance and weight.
The geekiness doesn’t stop with the swing and stroke analysis; the clubs are then custom-built to exacting, unrivaled tolerances, thanks in part to perfectly calibrated digital loft, lie and swing weight machines in every studio that match up precisely with those in the build shop. This conformity ensures that the club you hit in the fitting bay is the same club you purchase. Chuck Thiry, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Cleveland Golf says, “In our experience, Club Champion represents the finest in the art of club fitting and building. We are confident that Club Champion will fit, service and support the most discerning golfers at the highest possible levels.”
Lastly, Club Champion strives for perfection all the way down to the correction of manufacturing flaws. To varying degrees, golf shafts are not perfectly straight or perfectly round. Irregularities can cause problems when the shaft twists and bends during a swing. A process called SST PUREing addresses this; the system uses proprietary computer software to locate the “neutral” plane of each shaft. By assembling the club with the shaft in this PUREd position, off-line twisting and bending during the swing and at impact are greatly minimized. The system also generates a printout for each shaft, showing its structural and performance analysis. Club Champion PUREs more shafts than anyone else in the world - there are only 70 PUREing systems worldwide, and Club Champion owns three of them.
If there’s one thing that every golfer can agree upon, it’s that no one’s game is perfect. There’s always room for improvement. Club Champion agrees - they’re always adding and updating new technology to best fit golfers into clubs that gain distance, speed, accuracy and more. Why settle for the club fittings of yesterday when you could have a future of better golf?
For more information on Club Champion fittings or technology, call (888) 340-7820 or visit clubchampiongolf.com.
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