A skeptic's guide to new golf equipment

Every year, when Golf Digest identifies the best new golf equipment on the market, we do so recognizing the range of club consumers runs fairly broad.

At one end you have the gearheads who salivate over every advancement in club technology and know their way around a carbon-composite crown. At the other are the simpletons who love golf and appreciate the importance of good golf clubs, but don’t really care to know more than that.

Basically, I’m referring to people like me.

Even if I’ve long known new clubs can help golfers of all levels, I figured they’re all varying degrees of excellent, and there wasn’t much sense diving any deeper than that.

I took a trip to the Golf Digest Hot List Summit to convince me otherwise. While the rest of the team of testers and editors were obsessing over every detail of a testing process that led to the 138 new clubs on this year’s Hot List, I was playing catch-up through a crash course on basic equipment concepts that even a veteran golf editor never quite grasped.

Thanks to the tutelage of Golf Galaxy master clubfitter Devin Logue, we focused on four main areas: driver adjustability; the evolution of modern fairway woods and hybrids; the significance of bounce and grind with wedges; and the key considerations when choosing between blade and mallet putters.

Those lessons were captured in the videos below, each shedding light on the type of questions golfers should be asking when thinking about their clubs. If it was instructive for me, I expect it might be for you as well.

How to Take Advantage of Your Driver’s Adjustability

Almost every new driver comes with adjustability options, but golfers like me don’t utilize those options enough, or even know what to expect. As Logue explains, the right setting for your driver is less about changing your ball flight, and more about optimizing the one you have. “What we want to do is optimize the ball flight based on how you deliver the club,” Logue explains.

Rethinking Your Next Longest Clubs

Most average golfers understand they’re better off hitting something other than a 2- or 3-iron, but many of us make the mistake of hitting woods and hybrids that travel generally the same distance. This explains why the 7-wood has become such a popular option of late, and as Logue says, not just for weekend hackers. “It's not too good for the number one player in the world,” Logue said, referencing Scottie Scheffler’s use of the 7-wood. “You see players on tour that are starting to carry more higher-lofted fairway woods. The reality, just like we want your wedges to be gapped to distances so you have easier time hitting to different yardages, we want the top end in the bag to be the same way.”

Why Bounce and Grind Actually Matter

Your wedge decisions are about more than yardage, of course, because it’s the type of club with the most variability for where and how you use it. This is why it’s a mistake to choose your wedges only based on loft without taking into account the right bounce or grind, which go a long way in helping you optimize the type of shots you prefer to hit. “I guarantee if you're just grabbing a wedge off the rack, you're leaving something on the table. You want to make sure that your wedges are optimal for not only the conditions that you play in, but more importantly, they're optimal for how you deliver the club,” Logue says.

Blade or Mallet? How to Pick the Right Putter

In the same way the right driver adjustment can fit your ball flight, there’s likely an optimal putter for not only your stroke, but how you line up to the ball. And it’s not like there’s a clear line dividing mallet and blade. As Logue explained, the weight of the putter might matter most of all. “We want to make sure that we have a putter that's going to help maintain our speed control even when we don't have a perfect strike,” he said, “It really comes down to the individual player and finding what what works best for them.”