AskMyGolfSpy: The Equipment We Use To Test Your Equipment

The gear we use to test your gear: a rundown of the tools behind our annual club and putter testing and why each one earns its place.

We’ve covered the equipment behind our testing before. But every year, more golfers discover MyGolfSpy and with that comes a fresh round of questions about how we do what we do and what we use to do it.

Near the top of that list, every time: What equipment do we use during testing and why that instead of something else?

The honest answer is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This list doesn’t turn over often. When a tool earns its spot in our program, it tends to keep it. Still, enough has changed, and enough of you are new around here, that it felt like a good time to walk through the current rundown.

A quick bit of context before we get to it. None of this works without the facility. The building, the bays, the controlled environment we test in … that’s the foundation everything else sits on. But the foundation isn’t the story today. This one is specifically about club testing so maybe we’ll talk about Ball Lab and robot testing later.

With that, here’s the rundown.

Titleist Pro V1

Good testing is largely an exercise in killing variables. Anything you can hold constant, you hold constant, so that when a number moves, you know the club moved it and not something else.

The golf ball belongs on that list even if it doesn’t always get treated that way. We tend to think of a premium ball as a known quantity but years of work in Ball Lab and on the robot have taught us that the ball is often more of a variable than it reasonably should be. So for every club and putter test we run, we use the same ball: Titleist Pro V1.

The robot loves it. Across generations, the Pro V1 has proven about as consistent as anything we’ve put in front of it and it keeps clearing our quality bar. We’ve run eight different models from the Pro V1 family through Ball Lab over the years (Pro V1, Pro V1x, Left Dash) and across that entire sample exactlyone ball failed our checks. That’s a defect rate of 0.35 percent, well below our database average.

It doesn’t hurt that the Pro V1 is the No. 1 ball both on the PGA Tour and at retail which means nearly every golfer reading this has hit one. When the control in your experiment is also the ball most of your audience plays, that’s about as good a baseline as you’re going to find.

Buy Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls Now

PuttView putting green

Putter testing used to be the part of…