Getting Fitted At Club Champion Ann Arbor

Club Champion recently invited me to a fitting at their Ann Arbor store, and as I had been struggling for some time with my irons, I happily took them up on the offer.

A Club Champion fitting perhaps five years ago resulted in my Srizon Z 585 irons having the stock steel irons swapped out for a set of 50 gram Accra graphite shafts. I was very pleased with the results — they are still my gamers — but throughout this season have felt as though I had lost my sense of the bottom of the swing.

A swing change is not unexpected. I’m a senior golfer at this point; age in general and arthritis in particular have taken their toll. I thought that perhaps it was time for me to get a set of senior clubs — hollow body semi-hybrids and all that.

Club Champion Master Fitter William Moeller gave me the full Club Champion workup. We started with my gamers on the Trackman, measuring distance, carry, club speed, path, dynamic loft, spin, face angle, low point and a score of other details.

Then it was on to testing a couple of dozen head and shaft combinations.

This is where Club Champion really shines — and where it distinguishes itself from other fittings I have done.

Club Champion has a long wall of hundreds of different shafts and clubheads, which can be swiftly swapped out one to the other. In contrast, other fittings I have done consisted of trying a bunch of off-the-shelf clubs to see which of the available stock models performs best.

While there is nothing wrong with the best-of-stock approach, per se, Club Champion offers a fine tuning that appeals to the gear nerd in me.

Working through such an exponentially large number of combinations would be a fool’s errand on one’s own. Fortunately, Moeller knew just where to dial in. We narrowed my selection down to a few clubs and then found the perfect set.

My gamers. My old Srizon Z 585s.

With one caveat. In experimenting, Moeller found that adding lead tape to the Z 585s helped me find the bottom and produce measurably better results. Whereas without the lead tape, the Z 585s came in at a C9 – D0, a D3 improved my results.

In fact, none of the other club and shaft combinations we tested added more than a couple of yards distance than the Z 585s with lead tape. None of the other clubs were more accurate, either. At that point, Moeller said, it really didn’t make sense to get another set. What I really needed was to have the swingweight weight adjusted.

So that’s what we did. He also adjusted the lofts and lies on the clubs to standardize them. A couple of working days later and I was back in business.

Am I suddenly a single digit handicapper? Nope. But I do feel as though good results are expected, rather than an aberration.

If you are serious about your golf game, get fitted for clubs.