Do you know that feeling that the next golf season is ahead of you? I really feel that way about my golf game in 2026.
A handful of my colleagues and I just got home from over a week of testing the 2026 club offerings from the major manufacturers in Carlsbad, California and Phoenix – and, boy, am I excited.
In fact, I’m so confident that my 2026 set will take my game to the next level that I’m starting to fixate on finally qualifying for the US Mid-Amateur. (It doesn’t hurt that next year’s event will be held on Sand Valley’s spectacular Lido course.)
As a gear editor here at GOLF, I already had a precisely optimized setup for my game, and yet I still expect to be changing every club in my bag next season — with the exception of my mini driver, putter, and possibly my hybrid. That’s after getting into our recent gauntlet of fittings and just being wary of my driver configuration.
Now I know for sure that I will have a set of clubs that will alleviate my dreaded left miss, while also allowing me to easily hit any shot I want without having to ‘make it work’. In a video we’ll publish early next year, you’ll see a great example of how I’m making my current driver work instead of the driver work for me.
Essential to our testing process were the extremely talented engineers I was fortunate to work with: Bryan Rourke at Ping; Chandler Carr and Brandon Dooley at TaylorMade; Louis Raynard at Titleist; Andrew Lusty at Cobra; and Gerritt Pon at Callaway. Together they help me find new grinds for wedges, different shaft profiles for my woods, and irons tailored to my loft/lie specs.
There’s so much great new technology coming and I’d love to tell you all about it, but I can’t quite do it yet! What I can tell you is that 2026 can’t come soon enough.
3 things I’m thinking about
TaylorMade and Ping are coming to 2026: While I can’t yet go into detail about my experiences with the TaylorMade Qi4D and Ping G440K driver, I will say that these two clubs are already popular on worldwide tours. TaylorMade will have its top dogs (Scottie, Rory and Tommy) gaming its new drivers before 2026 even starts, alongside a host of other pros on various tours. Meanwhile, Ping has also seen strong adoption of its G440K driver; Lauren Coughlin just won it on Sunday at the Grant Thornton Invitational.
Is Cobra’s mini driver finally coming? Lexi Thompson was spotted with a new Cobra King Tec MD Mini Driver at the Grant Thornton. Could this be the long-awaited Cobra minidriver that we’ve seen prototypes of since late last year? Images shared by GolfWRX appear to show finished cosmetics and make no mention of “prototype.”
What is Jason Day up to? We used the same headline in this space a few weeks ago – and it still applies! In October, Day debuted a set of Avoda prototype irons in his bag. He only played again at the Grant Thornton last week and came armed not only with a new set of Avoda prototypes, but also with a seven-year-old TaylorMade M5 driver, which to this day remains my favorite driver I’ve ever owned. (It’s also the driver Tiger Woods played at the 2019 Masters.) Day is preparing some cool stuff for 2026, and I’m 100 percent for it.
#excited #club #offering