Including the Ones Where We Sold Nothing
These are collected from the follow-up notes Ruth keeps, printed with permission and trimmed only for length. Roughly a third of them describe a session that ended without a purchase, which is close to the real ratio.
We do not offer anything in exchange for feedback. No discount, no free regrip, no entry into a draw. Anything on this page was said by someone who had already paid and left.
I had been playing the same three-wood for eleven years and could not work out why it went nowhere off the deck at Genoa. Turned out the shaft was fine and the club was two degrees too flat for my setup. Forty-five dollars of bench work, no new club.
The three-column sheet sounded like a gimmick until I took it to a family trip in San Diego. My seven-iron did exactly what the sea-level column said it would. First time in twenty years I have not airmailed a green on a vacation round.
Moved here from Portland in February and spent the whole spring hitting everything through the back. I assumed I had somehow got better. Ninety minutes in the bay and I had a sheet that explained six months of confusion.
What sold me was being told the four-iron and the hybrid were doing the same job and one of them should go. Nobody had ever suggested I carry fewer clubs before. That empty slot became a second wedge and my scoring changed inside a month.
I went in expecting to be sold a driver and came out with a shorter shaft in the one I already owned. He showed me the dispersion side by side and there was no argument to have. Three yards shorter, twelve yards narrower.
My wedges were set up for the Gulf Coast, where I learned to play. On August turf here the leading edge was sitting up and I was thinning everything. She swapped me into a lower bounce grind off a bare-lie plate and I stopped being scared of tight lies.
The putter session was the one I thought was a waste of money. They cut an inch and a half off, put a weight in the butt end, bent the lie two flat, and charged me less than a green fee. I have three-putted twice since June.
I brought in a sheet from a fitting I had paid a lot of money for elsewhere. They read it at the counter for nothing, told me it was sound, and sent me home. That is the reason my whole foursome now comes here.
My daughter grew four inches in a year and the set she got at Christmas was suddenly wrong. Half price on the session, free length and lie work, and nobody tried to sell a fourteen-year-old a new bag. We will be back every summer.
League golf at the lake and weekday golf in the valley, seventeen hundred feet apart. I had two yardage books in my bag and neither of them worked. The lake column on the sheet fixed that in one visit.
Session ended with them telling me my irons were fine and the problem was that my grips were two sizes too small and had been for years. Six dollars a club plus grips. I did not know whether to be pleased or annoyed.
What I appreciated was the fan. Every fitting I had done before was in a still room, and every shaft they liked flew beautifully until I got on a course in the afternoon. Testing into wind eliminated two of the three finalists on the spot.
Why There Is No Star Rating Anywhere on This Site
A number out of five tells you almost nothing about a fitting studio. Every shop in the trade sits somewhere between four and a half and five, because the people who had an ordinary experience never write anything down and the people who bought something expensive are motivated to feel good about it.
What is worth reading is the specific thing a golfer says changed. If four separate people mention the same finding — grips too small, driver too long, a four-iron nobody should be carrying — that is real information about how a studio works. A rounded average is not.
The Feedback We Actually Chase
Ruth calls or emails roughly two months after a build goes out, which is long enough for the novelty to wear off and for a few real rounds to have happened. That is when the useful answers arrive. Anything said in the car park on the day a golfer collects a new club is enthusiasm, not evidence.
The elevation model gets recalibrated twice a year partly out of those calls. When somebody plays a trip to the coast and reports that the sea-level column was two yards optimistic on the long irons, that goes into the notes and eventually into the maths.
If you have been fitted here: the most useful thing you can tell us is where the sheet was wrong. Nobody has ever been made to feel awkward for reporting that, and several of the improvements to how we run sessions came in exactly that way.
Add Your Own Version of This Later
Book a session, play a few rounds with the sheet, then tell Ruth whether it held up. Both outcomes are useful to us.