Choosing Your Clubs

The first step is choosing a set of clubs. But how do you know what to choose? Your first inclination may be to buy a very cheap starter set at your local department store. It doescome with 3 woods, 9 irons and a putter. Wow, it even comes with a bag. That's fine if you've got a good place to store it in the garage. Chances are you'll outgrow that set within months or worse yet, you'll hit them so badly you'll give up golf.

A beginner, perhaps more than any other golfer needs clubs that are right for them. Learning the game is hard enough without trying to play it with clubs that are too long, too heavy, and too hard to hit. With a little help you can find clubs that match your ability level and physique.

First a little background on what makes a golf club easy to hit.

Winston Churchill said "Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose." If he was around today he'd be singing a different tune. You CAN find weapons that get the job done. You just need to know what to look for.

Most beginners end up with clubs that are too long, don't have enough loft and don't fit their skill level...or more accurately, lack of skill level. They need clubs that compensate for their inevitable mishits. Here's some club types and features to look for.

Ping invented the easy to hit, perimeter weighted, cavity back iron design in the 80s. Over the years that design has been improved and today, a new category of Super Game Improvement irons are available. These clubs offer maximum forgiveness. They feature cavity back perimeter weighting, wide soles, oversized heads and clubface offset. These features help make a club that is forgiving on mishits, gets the ball up in the air easier, and slides through the turf more smoothly.

The new hybrid clubs offer a great replacement for the hard-to-hit long irons (2-5). Their design makes it easier to get the ball up higher and are great from bad lies and the sand. New offerings in fairway woods (7, 9, 11) with higher lofts and low profiles get the ball up easier and their shorter lengths make consistent contact more reliable.

New drivers have massive heads made from titanium. Titanium is lighter so that allows the clubheads to be larger without making them heavier. The advantage of larger heads is the hitting area (sweet spot) is larger. This makes them more forgiving on mishits and means the average drive will go further because contact is made closer to this sweet spot more often.

So what should a beginners set configuration look like?
As we mentioned a beginner is looking for the most forgiveness possible, so for each club category you want to find clubs with the largest sweet spot, the most loft and the shortest length possible without making the club too light. Beginners should also consider smaller sets (10-12 clubs instead of the allowable 14). Why buy clubs that you probably won't need or use.

• Driver should be oversized with a minimum of 12 degrees of loft.

• Fairway woods should be 5, 7, 9 lofts, and maybe 11 (for slower swing speeds)

• Irons should be Super Game Improvement with numbers 6 through sand wedge.

• Hybrids replace the long irons. You want hybrids 4-5.

• Putter should be one of the new mallets with greater MOI (resistance to twisting).

Now let's use GigaGolf's eFit System to select our clubs and fine tune them to our height, swing speed, and grip size. eFit will help you along the way. To get help and more information about your selection click anywhere you see the blue i.