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 models
01:32come in 11.5 and 13.5 degree options, and you can lock them up on the loft sleeve, so you can actually
01:38get them to a pretty standard three-wood loft, and you've just got a tiny bit of extra shaft length,
01:44and you've got that extra mass behind the ball. I think this trend is here to stay. For me,
01:50as 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 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 in
02:50their revealer, that orientation allows the club face to stay square to the par throughout the stroke
02:57without 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 passionate
03:37about, and I genuinely think that is the future of putting, and that is a gear trend that's here to
03:41stay. Okay, while we are on the putting green, I've got another gear trend for you to do with putting
03:48that I think is here to stay from 2024. Those of you who listened to the Kickpoint Golf Gear podcast
03:54from Golf Monthly will know 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. Now, these were released
04:04this year, and to me, it just makes perfect sense. We spend a lot of time with putting technically
04:11trying to remove that bottom hand from the game, trying to slow it down and give it less power over
04:16the stroke, but we've been using grips for years that are either tapering from wider to thinner down
04:22to the 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 Superstroke have been doing for
04:31some time, which has really, really helped, but Golf Pride this year have engineered a reverse taper grip.
04:36In fact, they've engineered three reverse taper fits. We've got the round, we've got the pistol, and we've
04:41got the flat, and they go the opposite way, as you can imagine. Thinner at the top, and they get thicker
04:47down the bottom, and when you think about it, if we've got something thicker in that bottom hand, most of us
04:52know that thicker grips tend to deactivate hands a little bit, so when we've got something thicker
04:56in the bottom hand, that's got to be good for our stroke. I've tested, obviously these aren't on a
05:01putter, but I've tested these out quite significantly, and I've had some really, really good results, and
05:06I've actually got one on my game of putter at the moment, so I feel like I can talk with some authority
05:10on the topic. It really does quieten down that bottom hand. It's really helping me hit my start lines
05:15more often, and again, I think this is a gear trend that's going to be with us for a long, long time.
05:21So I've come down the fairway here off that lovely Mini Driver t-shirt, one of my other trends, to
05:25talk to you about another trend that I think is here to stay, and that is full face grooves. Now,
05:30we've seen full face grooves for a number of years on wedges, like the tailor-made high-toe wedges,
05:36various Callaway iterations, but not so much on irons, and I think it is something that we really need to
05:44consider. So I've got with me here, the Cleveland Halo XL full face irons. Now, when you first look
05:50at it, it is a visual that takes a little bit of getting used to, but when you dig into it, you dig
05:55into the 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,
06:11low spinning 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
06:32MOI and put the CG where you want it. Now, for me, again, like I've said, it's been in wedges for a
06:38little while, but I don't know why it's not across the board commonplace. When you think about it,
06:43it makes no sense. Why would we ever stop the grooves there? I think sometimes in golf,
06:47we're very much victims of just accepting things how they've always been and not questioning it.
06:52So for me, and I'm just going to 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 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. Now, 3D printing has
07:26been 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
07:36printed iron. And I've tested this quite extensively and the feel is extraordinary. I'm not going to
07:41get into all of the tech because that's for another video, but basically what Cobra have done here is
07:46they've created a player looking iron with about as much game improvement technology as in any other
07:52club I've ever tried. It's quite extraordinary. And if Bryson DeChambeau is to believe, and this is
07:57quite a terrifying thought, before too long, 3D printers at home, you could be sat there with an idea in
08:03your head watching the golf, head to your garage and you could be prototyping your very own irons
08:08and wedges before too long and have them almost hittable within a day or so, pop a shaft on and
08:12go and test out a new concept down the golf course. Now, that's a terrifying thought for some of my
08:17friends who've got some really wacky ideas, but it's also exciting for the innovation in the golf industry.
08:23And I think that's something to keep an eye on moving forward. And 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.
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