Somebody rings the studio about this every few weeks, always in roughly the same words: they have a spec sheet with three carry columns on it, they can see that the columns are useful, and they have no idea what to physically carry in their bag on a Saturday. Reading a table at home is one thing. Standing on a tee box with a phone in your pocket and a group waiting behind you is another.
So here is what actually works, having watched people try most of the alternatives.
Do not carry three columns. Carry two.
The sheet has three because the studio needs three to show the shape of the correction. You do not. In any given week you are playing one elevation band, and you already know which one before you leave the house.
Pick the two you actually use. For most golfers here that is the valley figure and the lake figure. For somebody who plays only in the valley but flies to see family in California twice a year, it is the valley figure and the sea-level figure. Write those two, ignore the third, and the card stays legible.
A yardage card you can read in one glance beats a more accurate one you have to squint at.
The index card that lives in the scorecard holder
The version that has survived longest among our customers is embarrassingly low-tech. One index card, cut down to fit the scorecard holder on a cart or the back pocket of a bag. Club names down the left, two columns of numbers, nothing else on it. No launch angles, no spin figures, no notes about swing thoughts. Fourteen rows and two columns.
Laminate it or put it in a sandwich bag. Ours get handed out on card stock for exactly this reason and they still come back four seasons later looking like they have been through a washing machine, which several of them have.
Write the number you actually carry, not the one you hit once
This is where most home-made cards go wrong. The figure that belongs on the card is the middle of your pattern, not the best ball you have ever struck with that club. If your seven-iron carries 168 on a good one and 152 on a poor one, the card says 160, because on a par three over water you are picking the club that covers the shot you usually hit.
Nobody enjoys writing that number down. Everybody plays better once they have.
Round to fives
Precision past five yards is fiction on a golf course. The wind changes, the lie is not flat, the pin is not where the yardage marker assumes, and your own dispersion is wider than the rounding error. Writing 163 instead of 165 implies a level of control that does not exist and makes the card harder to read at a glance.
The one exception is wedges, where five yards is a real difference and the numbers are small enough that the extra digit does not clutter anything.
What a finished card looks like
| Club | Valley | Lake | Note on the card |
|---|---|---|---|
| Driver | 245 | 255 | Carry only, ignore the roll |
| 3 wood | 220 | 230 | Off the deck, not the tee |
| 4 hybrid | 195 | 205 | |
| 6 iron | 175 | 180 | |
| 8 iron | 150 | 155 | |
| Pitching wedge | 125 | 130 | |
| 52 degree | 108 | 112 | Three-quarter: 92 / 95 |
| 56 degree | 88 | 91 | Three-quarter: 74 / 77 |
Notice what has happened at the top and the bottom. The driver gains ten yards going up to the lake and the sand wedge gains three. That is the proportional correction doing its work, and it is the single most important thing the card teaches its owner over a season. After about six rounds people stop needing to look at it for the wedges and still look at it for the woods, which is exactly the right instinct.
The partial-swing line is worth the ink
Two extra numbers on the wedge rows, for whatever your controlled three-quarter swing produces. Most golfers have one of these and have never measured it. Having it written down is what stops the ugly decision where you have 95 yards, a full sand wedge is 88, a full 52 is 108, and you invent something halfway that you have never practised.
When to redo the card
Once a season is plenty for most people, and the right time is late spring rather than the first warm week. A card built off March numbers will read short all summer. If you change a shaft, a set, or your swing in any meaningful way, redo it then instead.
Temperature is the other reason cards drift. These numbers assume something like a normal afternoon. If you are the sort of golfer who tees off at six in the morning through July, build the card from morning numbers and accept that your afternoon rounds will play a touch long. Trying to make one card cover a forty-degree daily swing produces a card that is wrong twice a day instead of once.
What not to put on it
Total distance. Ball speed. Anything from a marketing chart. Any number somebody else told you about their own game. A yardage card is a private document about one golfer, and the moment it contains a figure you did not personally produce in front of a radar unit, it stops being useful and starts being aspirational.
If you have been fitted here, the two columns you need are already on your sheet and the card takes about four minutes to write out. If you have not, and you would like the numbers to come from somewhere other than optimism, that is what the bay is for.