Forty Yards Nobody Measures, on Ground That Never Softens
The band under your pitching wedge is where most rounds are decided and where almost nobody has real numbers. It is also the part of the bag most affected by how firm our fairways get.
80 minutes · $145
Includes groove inspection, loft and lie measurement, and full-swing plus partial-swing carry data.
Effective Bounce Is Not the Number Stamped on the Sole
The figure printed on a wedge assumes the club arrives at a particular shaft lean and the ground yields a particular amount. Change either and the effective bounce changes with it.
Our ground yields very little for five months of the year. A wedge with twelve degrees of stamped bounce behaves like a much higher-bounce club on August turf, because the sole never sinks in. The leading edge sits up, and the result is the thin shot that flies the green — not from a bad swing, but from equipment that was chosen for a different surface.
Golfers who move here from wetter climates usually arrive with too much bounce and cannot work out why their short game has fallen apart. It is the single most common finding on this session.
Grind Matters More Than Bounce on Firm Turf
Heel and toe relief lets you open the face without the leading edge rising off the ground. On soft turf you can get away without it because the sole sinks. On hard ground you cannot, and a wedge with a full sole becomes genuinely difficult to use out of a tight lie with the face open.
We test candidates from three surfaces: a firm mat, a bare-lie plate, and the practice bunker sand we keep in a tray at the back. What survives all three is what goes on the sheet.
Gapping Under the Pitching Wedge
Modern iron sets have strengthened lofts to the point where the pitching wedge in a game-improvement set can be 42 degrees or stronger. If your sand wedge is 56, that is a fourteen-degree hole with, in this air, something close to forty yards inside it.
Two wedges cannot cover forty yards without partial swings, and partial swings are the least repeatable thing most amateurs do. So we measure your actual pitching wedge loft first, then work down from it in even steps rather than assuming a standard progression.
Worth knowing: thin air widens wedge gaps too, just by less. A ten-yard gap at sea level is about eleven here. Over four wedges that adds up to a club's worth of extra spacing to account for.
Partial Swings Get Measured Too
Full-swing wedge numbers are the least useful data in the bag, because you rarely hit a full wedge. So about a third of the session is spent on controlled partial swings at two reference positions, recorded the same way as everything else.
Most golfers discover their three-quarter swing with one wedge produces the same carry as a full swing with the next one down, which means one of the two clubs is redundant and the other is doing double duty. That is a useful thing to learn in a bay rather than over water.
Put Numbers on the Scoring Clubs
It is the cheapest session that changes the most shots, and almost nobody books it first.