How 5 Days of Club Fitting Changed My Opinion About Golf Equipment | Fully fit 2026

When I arrived in Carlsbad, California – home to (most) of the best golf club manufacturers in the world – in early December, it felt a bit like those first few days of college.

My future was clear: spend a week wandering around Southern California, from company to company, becoming ‘Fully Fit’ for new golf clubs in each place. And I was as cheerful as 7-handicaps could be – anxiously interested in being there, in much the same way that my 18-year-old self was anxiously interested in going to the University of Wisconsin. I understood my game upon arrival, but I also knew that this experience would be very good for me. I knew I would learn a lot, that I would have a lot of people looking out for me, and that I would probably make some friends along the way. This collegial atmosphere made sense, I would soon learn, because like many things in golf, an equipment trip can feel a lot like studying. There are entry-level classes, courses required for a major, and 700-level things like Spin Loft waiting to trip you up.

You can be lazy about it and not care, choosing the bliss of ignorance. Someone else may pay for your equipment, just as many parents pay for their children’s education. You can declare your intentions for a major corporation just as you can declare your commitment to one manufacturer. Maybe your friend stated the same thing and you wanted to be just like them. That can be a costly decision if you suddenly change things years later.

Another option is of course… leaning all the way in to equipment training, where you seize the opportunity and come out on the other side feeling like you’ve graduated. (Knowing, of course, that there’s always a deeper version of golfy graduate school if you want to continue.) This stuff is precious, too! Just like higher education. You want to do it right. That’s why I was there. I wanted to do it right.

To keep this analogy going, let’s say I stopped my equipment training years ago. Cobra gave me a great opportunity in 2016 and asked me to claim whatever set of poles I wanted. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I asked for a set of forged swords – the ones Rickie Fowler used to win the 2015 Players Championship – and said to myself: You learn how to hit them.

This led me down a bad path, partly because I did learn. Just by practicing, my ball striking improved, and my handicap also improved. But was I ever meant to play with those knives? I ditched the Cobras for a set of brutal Mizunos a few years later, obsessed with how they looked, and then played a set of Titleist blades.

It was probably never intended that way. Between my action, my dedication to the game, and my age, it has become clear that playing a set of butter knife irons – in addition to boosting my ego – led to gap issues and extreme inconsistency at the long end of the bag. And what my trip to California confirmed day after day was that somewhere just outside Bladesville there is a promised land.

TDay 1 was in TaylorMade’s Kingdom, where the difference between P770s, PTWs, P790s and P7CBs finally became clear to me – much more than the letters and numbers in those names ever did before. My TaylorMade fitter was torn between installing Project

“Why are you waving a telephone pole?” he asked. My eyes were wide, my mind was racing, I hoped he was joking. “That’s what Rory McIlroy uses,” he continued, chuckling. “You don’t swing like Rory McIlroy.”

And he was right. But as the fitting progressed, I warmed up and became comfortable in those 6.5 stiffness shafts, because over the years I had grooved a swing that matched them, and that swing didn’t yield results. terrible results. So we basically stayed with them.

A day later we learned even more at Titleist. The gamers I arrived with were the Titleist T100s, made for the very consistent ball striker who has no problem hitting ball heights consistently. I can groove a nice, high flight with everything from 7 iron to pitching wedge, which made these clubs a great fit. But it was 4i, 5i and 6i that were always a bit fickle. All my strikes towards the heel or toe always failed to fly the distance I needed, and often turned much more. But as we searched several iron heads, we found something:

T150s and their extra forgiveness just outside the sweet spot – right in it Mine typical strike zone – had a much closer spread and carry distance. Simply put, they were predictable. And when it came to getting those long irons off the ground, a higher-launching T250 5-iron would reach that peak height of 80 feet much more often.

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ALSO AVAILABLE AT: PGA Tour Superstore, Title list

On the third day, at Cobra, the knowledge of three successive adaptations washed over me like the second semester of a foreign language. Was I completely fluent? Not quite. But I could understand what others in the class were saying. I understood what it meant when my fitters kept setting my irons two degrees upright, and I could really start to communicate what I was feeling. After a while it was no longer so difficult to say something in class. It helped that my colleagues – many of whom could qualify as teaching assistants – intervened and interrupted my adjustments, pressing the teachers for more information specifically about ME. (That may not help you, the amateur at home, who will likely endure the adjustments alone. But it’s a reminder to study some club terminology before you get baptized in a battlefield.)

My last two fittings tended to blend together, but not in a bad way. They contained a lot of time just spent past the irons. In that zone between 3-wood and 5-iron, where you should still be able to see 30- to 50-foot gaps between clubs. My gap had mostly flattened out to something almost non-existent. Everything seemed to go about 700 feet.

At Callaway I had my first experience with a 7-wood – their Quantum Max – which almost ended up in my bag (and it still might, the more I experiment with it).

At Srixon I hit more 5-woods than I probably have at any other time in my life. The ball just… went …in a way, 4-irons never seemed to do that. Above all, that was the biggest learning experience of my week in equipment academy. The aspects of my experience, my action, my strength, my skills, my hand-eye coordination, my brain – it all makes a lot more sense with fairway woods than with cute, little, aesthetically pleasing long irons.

The clubs we went with – built for comfort, performance and looks – are all listed below, including a driver and 3-wood that I just can’t stop playing. What I need to do now – metaphorically moving the tassel of my cap from one side to the other – is apply all the lessons from the equipment degree I earned to the real world, as they say. You know, on the golf course.

See more about Sean’s WITB here

Sean’s fully fit 2026 WITB

Ball: 2025 Titleist Pro V1

Director: Titleist GT2 9° (Tour AD VF-6

3w: Titleist GT2 13.5° (Project

5w: Titleist GT2 16.5° (HZRDUS 6.5, 80g)

Utility: TaylorMade P-UDI 4 iron (KBS Tour Lite S)

Irons: Titleist T250 5i, T150 6i-PW (Project

Wedges: Vokey 50.12F, 54.14F, 58.10S (Project

Goldfinch: TaylorMade Spider Tour

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