Why your next custom fitting might not require a single swing

A century ago, Bobby Jones was making a backup for his legendary Jeanie Deans driver. He sorted through “5,000 pieces of first-grade hickory to find four shafts” that were close. The process was an elaborate exercise of “guess and check.”

Fitting golfers to clubs has changed immensely since then, and yet it hasn’t. It’s still a tentative dance between what the experts think they know and what the golfers think they feel.

The most visible presence of the future state is Club Champion, the world powerhouse in elite custom-fitting. Club Champion founder Nick Sherburne first brought artificial intelligence to the company’s 160-store network five years ago, and now its AI-driven Co-Pilot system can produce recommendations in as little as 10 swings. It has fundamentally shifted the clubfitting dynamic from guess and check to objective digital facts. With tens of thousands of permutations on its wall of clubheads and components, no human fitter could adequately ever process all of a customer’s potential specifications. Now, not only does the human fitter not have to know everything, he or she gets smarter with every other fitter’s findings. Sherburne literally hits a button every week to update the software and make it smarter for every fit at every store.

“At first, the new fitters loved it because it made them smarter quicker,” Sherburne says, “but when the old guard would see it recommend something unconventional, they would say, ‘No way, that’s crazy.’ Of course, what’s happening is that somebody somewhere in this organization was fitting a golfer like that, or else it wouldn’t spit it out. But nine times out of 10 when we try it, it’s dead-on.” 

Sherburne said the company’s fitting recommendations cover a broader spread than in years past, a direct result of a system that is free from the typical biases that human fitters naturally develop in managing a wildly diverse system of potential solutions. It’s something only AI could reasonably navigate.

You can type your launch conditions into a new software package called ELDRICK and get instant club and shaft recommendations as part of a new app developed by long-time nationally regarded clubfitters Dan Sueltz and Eric Touchet. Any golfer can have an online session with Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude and get very detailed recommendations about the best new driver based on how you describe your game. The limitations: AI only really knows what’s already out there, including misconceptions from YouTube influencers and Reddit posts.

There remains a persistent problem with theory-based clubfitting: The golfer is an inconsistent, perhaps even unreliable witness. Perhaps most frustratingly, AI has not developed a handle on how different golfers perceive performance, particularly feel. Bobby Jones knew the right shaft by its specific heft in his well-trained fingers, but why one golfer responds to the flex profile of one shaft or the sound of this driver hasn’t been completely digitized, only approximated and generalized for the overall golfer population. For the brief present, why you like something seems beyond the realm of 0s and 1s. Understanding the right club for the right golfer remains an art form, just as it was for fitters a century ago.

Give Sherburne and his team another six months, maybe less. “We’re probably 90 percent of the way there, but that’s where it gets difficult. The cool part? It’s learning.”