- 10 months ago
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!
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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
00:15for innovation, 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 AI
00:47Smoke 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, and I think
00:57it'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 want
01:12that 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 footprint's
01:22a lot bigger, which I'll show you in a second. If I put down the TaylorMade mini driver there,
01:27in behind the ball, that feels like double the size of a standard three-wood. Now, both of these
01:32models come in 11.5 and 13.5 degree options, and you can lock them up on the loft sleeve, so you can
01:38actually 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,
01:49and for me, as a higher speed player, I see it as that driver alternative. I've got mine at 11.5,
01:55lofted down just a fraction, just a shade over 10.5, and on tight holes like this,
02:04I find it really, really useful, a nice penetrating ball flight, and it helps me find a
02:09lot more fairways, and I think this is a trend that's here to stay.
02:14So, another gear trend that I think is here to stay, in fact, no, I'm going to go a step further,
02:18I think is the future of putters, is lie angle balance. Now, I've got with me here the LabGolf
02:24DF3 putters, and LabGolf are the early adopters of lie angle balance. It's their name, Lab, L-A-B,
02:31lie angle balance. So, what is a lie angle balance putter, I hear you ask? Well, you might have heard the
02:36term toe, hang, and face balance before. Lie angle balance putters sit kind of with the toe up. If
02:41I don't touch that shaft, and I leave it to orientate itself, see how the toe of the putter
02:45stays up? That is lie angle balanced. 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 path 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,
03:13but Tiger's a particularly special athlete that I think maybe we shouldn't all necessarily model
03:18ourselves on. For me, it really simplifies things if the putter blade wants to stay square.
03:23So, when you're on short putts in particular, assuming you've got the right read and the right
03:27alignment, that putter blade just wants to stay square to the target. It doesn't want to rotate
03:32away from square, and that really helps with your start line. It's something I'm really
03:37passionate about, and I genuinely think that is the future of putting, and that is a gear trend
03:41that's here to stay. Okay, while we are on the putting green, I've got another gear trend for you
03:47to do with putting that I think is here to stay from 2024. Those of you who listen to the Kickpoint
03:53Golf Gear podcast from Golf Monthly will know I've got a bit of a weird fascination with grips, and this
03:58is to do with the putter grips. In my hand, I've got the Golf Pride reverse taper grips. Now,
04:03these were released this year, and to me, it just makes perfect sense. We spend a lot of time with
04:08putting technically trying to remove that bottom hand from the game, trying to slow it down and give
04:14it less power over the stroke, but we've been using grips for years that are either tapering from wider to
04:21thinner down to the bottom end, which tends to give that right hand or the lower hand in your
04:25putting stroke more power, or we're using perfectly parallel grips, which companies like Super Stroke
04:30have been doing for some time, which has really, really helped, but Golf Pride this year have
04:34engineered a reverse taper grip. In fact, they've engineered three reverse taper fits. We've got the
04:39round, we've got the pistol, and we've got the flat, and they go the opposite way, as you can imagine.
04:45Thinner at the top, and they get thicker down the bottom, and when you think about it, if we've got
04:49something thicker in that bottom hand, most of us know that thicker grips tend to deactivate hands a
04:54little bit. When we've got something thicker in the bottom hand, that's got to be good for our
04:59stroke. I've tested, obviously, these aren't on a putter, but I've tested these out quite
05:03significantly, and I've had some really, really good results, and I've actually got one on my game
05:07of putter at the moment, so I feel like I can talk with some authority on the topic. It really does
05:12quieten down that bottom hand. It's really helping me hit my start lines more often, and again, I think
05:17this is a gear trend that's going to be with us for a long, long time. I've come down the fairway here
05:22off that lovely mini driver t-shirt, one of my other trends, to talk to you about another trend
05:26that I think is here to stay, and that is full face grooves. Now, we've seen full face grooves
05:32for a number of years on wedges, like the tailor-made high-toe wedges, various Callaway
05:37iterations, but not so much on irons, and I think it is something that we really need to consider,
05:45so I've got with me here the Cleveland Halo XL full face irons. Now, when you first look at it,
05:51it is a visual that takes a little bit of getting used to, but when you dig into it and you dig into
05:55the science and the tech behind it, it makes perfect sense. Firstly, from a spin point of view,
06:01why would you not want to standardize the spin on heel and toe strike? Sometimes if you hit a very
06:06extreme toe strike on an iron and you're hitting no grooves, you're going to get a very strange low
06:11spinning flight, so why would you not extend those grooves all the way to the edge of the face?
06:16Secondly, we're always looking to save weight in irons. Now, there's not going to be masses of
06:22saving just by milling extra grooves from there to the edge of the club, but there will be some,
06:27and every little milligram you can save in the club head can be redistributed elsewhere to increase MOI
06:33and put the CG where you want it. Now, for me, again, like I've said, it's been in wedges for a little
06:38while, but I don't know why it's not across the board commonplace. When you think about it, it makes no
06:43sense. Why would we ever stop the grooves there? I think sometimes in golf, we're very much victims
06:48of just accepting things how they've always been and not questioning it. For me, and I'm just going
06:54to hit one away for you here, the full face grooves in irons
07:01is something I think is here to stay. Also, I think it's going to be across the board commonplace
07:06in wedges 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. Now, 3D printing
07:26has been used a lot in prototyping, speeding up the prototyping process and people checking out what
07:31designs they're going to bring to market, but this is really the first consumer available 3D printed
07:36iron. I've tested this quite extensively and the feel is extraordinary. I'm not going to get into
07:42all of the tech because that's for another video, but basically what Cobra have done here is they've
07:46created a player looking iron with about as much game improvement technology as in any other club I've
07:52ever tried. It's quite extraordinary. If Bryson DeChambeau is to believe, and this is quite a terrifying
07:58thought, before too long, 3D printers at home, you could be sat there with an idea in your head
08:03watching the golf, head to your garage and you could be prototyping your very own irons and wedges
08:08before too long and have them almost hittable within a day or so, pop a shaft on and go and test out a
08:13new concept down the golf course. Now, that's a terrifying thought for some of my friends who've
08:17got some really wacky ideas, but it's also exciting for the innovation in the golf industry, and I think
08:24that's something to keep an eye on moving forward, and if the feel of these is anything to go by,
08:33then we're in for a really nice treat in the future with some of these 3D printed golf clubs.
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