The rest of the Titleist and Carlsbad experience

I’ll be waiting by the door for  the next 14 days.  That’s about the amount of time they said it could take to have my clubs built and shipped and I want to break them in ASAP.

The main reason I am excited is because the last time I was fit for clubs was more than 12 months ago and at the time my swing was as developed as a fifth grader and my main goal during the fitting was making contact with the ball, especially with the 3-wood and driver which had been in my hands for roughly five months total before I was fit for the sticks that I have used over the past year.  Five months of hitting tee shots is not an incredible amount of time no matter how often you practice, but add a full year of grooving some tendencies and you get to the point where you need an updated bag of clubs.

This happens with all types of endeavors; you eventually outgrow your violin or baseball glove or drum kit, etc and need something that will help you make the push to the next level.  For me, I decided to switch to a full bag of Titleist gear (albeit 13 clubs, I’m still enjoying the SeeMore putter and see no reason to switch that as putting is a strength in my game and I love rolling the ball.) for a number of reasons.  Word of mouth was a big one, as for the most part all of the scratch-to-plus handicap golfers I know swing Titleist, TaylorMade, Mizuno or Ping sticks. Not to say that there aren’t a bunch of other great companies out there (of course including the Nike experience that I had up until now), but I’ve noticed a consistency among the top players around the country.  Another reason is that I really enjoyed the wedge fitting and have loved my Vokeys since I began using them in February.  When I went down for that fitting I was blown away by the Titleist experience and decided that I wanted to know more about what they offered.

They offered a ton, too.  Being a lefty it’s often hard to find options with clubs.  But, they had a ton of lefty options that I got to try:

Love getting to test different clubs with varied lies and shafts and options.  Just plane love options.

And, the facility is amazing.  Here is a quick little video of the range:

Pretty incredible.  It was hard to leave, really.  I could seriously practice on that range every day, especially considering the golf brain power that calls Oceanside home.

But alas, all things must come to an end and my short stint getting fit for clubs was destined to be an just one afternoon.  Instead of going into a detailed explanation (for now) of why I was fit for which clubs, I thought that I would just post an image of the fitting sheet I got as well as post a link to a golfwrx blog that I wrote this week which goes into specifics about the fitting.

Pretty much ended up with extra stiff shafts on all the woods and stiff shaft for the irons.  There were some tweaks that every club needed but for the most part nothing was way off the chart, although there were some big differences between my existing clubs and the new ones.  One aspect that stood out was the driver.  The drivers I have always used have been stock 46″ length stiff shafts.  My new one will be a 44.5″ extra stiff shaft with a 1″ tipping.  That’s a big difference.  I broke down all the specifics in the golfwrx post which I will post a link to as soon as it goes live.

My goal now is to wait by the door, break in the new sticks and continue to build consistencies into my game.  The gold of this entire experience is that it takes doubt out of the equation.  Not to say that my other clubs were not good, it’s just that my swing and game has changed dramatically since having that fitting.  Now I am certain that I will have the best gear for my game as it looks this year, 2013.

During the fitting, through their eyes and the TrackMan data they pointed out that my driver swing had gotten very flat.  This is something that I have known for a while, but didn’t realize how inside-to-out it had gotten.  Sometimes when you practice something for a long time you can accentuate your tendencies and this flat swing has become a problem that is evident in the lack of fairways hit in an average round.  Having a shorter shaft and the knowledge of what a flat swing does with the ball flight should help me move forward.  Always moving forward.

I would like to thank Titleist and Senior Fitting Analyst Rob Bunn for being such a pleasure to work with.  I can’t recommend this experience enough.  Great guys!

After the fitting, they saw how worn my hat was and gave me a replacement to wear back to Portland.  I didn’t realize how much I had worn this green lucky clover hat since February, but I suppose I put gear through the wringer, as you can tell by the color change here:

That’s what happens when you wear a cap all day every day outside for about 2 months.

I would also like to thank the Carlsbad Inn for being a perfect hotel to stage this entire trip.  It was a wonderfully quaint place to stay for the fitting and also an extremely relaxing temporary home perfect for writing blogs:

Had to leave these scenes for now:

but hope to be back visiting Titleist again in 9-12 months.  For now, there is a lot to remember and even more to work on and I couldn’t be happier to get back to work.  Portland even welcomed me back with a perfectly beautiful day:

It is undeniably going to be a great year and has started off on all of the right feet.