Welcome to the 21st edition of the Golf Digest Hot List, the game’s most trustworthy equipment review. As the Hot List enters its third decade, one crucial fact has not changed: Golfers need help making sense of the dizzying choices facing them. Your best resource is always going to be an expert clubfitter you trust. However, to get the conversation started, you need a baseline of knowledge about what clubs should be on your shortlist. This is the mission of the Hot List, and the 2024 collection of Gold and Silver medal winners in drivers, woods, hybrids, irons, wedges and putters promises to be the most comprehensive yet.
This year we expanded the Hot List to include more detailed model reviews for the driver, fairway-wood and hybrid categories. These entries often include a family of models that share the same foundational technologies and appearance, but getting the wrong version for your needs won’t help you play your best. The ability to customize a club to your needs has never been more widespread. That’s one reason we doubled our fulltime panel of player testers to 32. From this array of swing types, we’re better able to collect insight from specific handicap groups on, for example, the highest-flying irons for low-launch players, or which drivers golfers with slower swing speeds found the most forgiving, or the best-feeling blade and mallet putters.
Our player testing, conducted at the Reunion Resort in Florida during three weeks in late 2023 with five on-site clubfitters, made something very clear: A ton of transformational golf clubs exist in the market, but only the right ones for your game can help you reach your potential.
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