Favorite Club Fittings of the Year? | 2nd Swing Fitting Insights

What are some of our fitter’s favorite club fittings of the year? 2nd Swing Fitters fit hundreds if not thousands of golfers every year, but do they have favorite club fittings? In this 2nd Swing Thoughts podcast, 2nd Swing Master Fitters Jake Montgomery and Maxwell Busch share some of their most memorable club fittings in 2025 and why these club fittings stood out to them. Which of these club fittings is your favorite story?

00:00 Introduction
00:35 Lady Golfer’s Club Fitting
02:25 High School Girl Club Fitting
03:50 Division 1 Hockey Player
05:40 High Swing Speed Player
07:50 PGA Tour Americas Players
09:40 Division 1 Golfer Fitting

The 2nd Swing Thoughts podcast, presented by 2nd Swing Golf, covers anything and everything in golf equipment and club fitting. The 2nd Swing Thoughts will feature experts in the golf industry sharing insights and latest trends in golf clubs and club fittings. 2nd Swing Thoughts will also cover the latest in professional golf.

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/2bJFzfhoUmpHZF6fyFsjmX

LISTEN ON AMAZON: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f5e3b825-bae2-40d0-9ec4-722e96b99de6/2nd-swing-thoughts

LISTEN ON APPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2nd-swing-thoughts/id1683899359

Schedule an award-winning 2nd Swing fitting: https://www.2ndswing.com/golf-club-fittings

SUBSCRIBE to the 2nd Swing YouTube channel today for more in-depth golf equipment reviews and club fitting insights.

FOLLOW 2ND SWING GOLF ON SOCIAL MEDIA:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/2ndSwingGolf

X: https://X.com/2ndSwingGolf

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/2ndswinggolf/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@2ndswinggolf

[Music] Hello golfers. My name is Jake Montgomery. I’m a master fitter at at the Minneapolis store. I am joined here by Maxwell Bush, fellow master fitter. Uh we’ve kind of reached the end of the season here, so we were looking to recap some of our more memorable fittings from this past season. Uh is there anything that sticks out to you right away? Yeah. Um, I mean, we kind of talked about maybe our our three most memorable fittings we had uh over the course of the year. One that sticks out to me was uh I had a lady come in uh hadn’t played golf since I want to say she said high school. Um, coming in, she was candid about being in her late 40s, so hadn’t played in, you know, 20, 30 years. Um, and she was a little discouraged by her golf bag having been from, you know, I think the late 80s or early 80s. Uh, lots of heavy shafts, not a lot of lightweight graphite options back then. So, we got this lady into a set of Calloy Max Fast irons. Put the Mitsubishi LDO40 shaft in there. Uh, dropped a ton of weight from her prior set. We got her carrying the ball with her gamer. She was about carrying about 65 70 yards on a good, you know, well struck shot. Then with the Callaway Max Fast, we got her carrying the ball all the way out to 125 on a couple shots with her seven iron. That’s great. So just by dropping a lot of weight, she was hitting the ball almost twice as far with her seven iron. Um and that really really lifted her spirits. We just did uh we just did the irons that day, but then couple weeks later after she had gone out on the course and hit them, uh she came back to me and we got the whole rest of the bag done. Yeah. So, we’ve finished up the the golf bag with a bunch of Wells and Staff Dino Power Ladies uh Woods and Hybrids, and she just, you know, I think it had the Project X, the Even Flow ladies shaft in it, so super lightweight again. Uh, but everything was just kind of going high and straight for her. So, it was very memorable for me just because I was able to maybe flip her perception of golf and get her excited to go out and play with her friends and her her husband and and kids. Um, whereas she she wasn’t super into it, you know, coming into it a little discouraged. So, that one was kind of a feel-good fitting, I would say, and two fittings at that as she came back. So, yeah, I mean that that’s a great story. I actually have something to kind of follow up on there as well. So, I had a high school girl come in. uh she had just gone through her sophomore season, I believe, and seemed like she was a little frustrated or didn’t really kind of like where her game was at the time. I kind I came to find out later on that that really was the case. Sure. Um but yeah, she had an older set as well, kind of stuff from like the early 2000s. She had graphite all the way through, but it was still pretty heavy. Wasn’t the proper length for her. Um we ended up getting her into I believe it was the 923 Mazuno HL iron, so we got some more height from that. And then uh TS1 driver, fair forwards, and hybrids to kind of finish out the set there. Um I could tell her excitement level was kind of building as we were going. Her smash factor, which is for those of you that don’t know, your ball speed divided by club head speed. It basically is a ratio of how well you’re hitting it. It improved quite a bit. I mean on the irons, we went from somewhere in the 1.1s to into the 1.3. So making much more solid contact, smash factor, got into the 1.45 range with drivers. She was really just catching everything very clean. Um, and yeah, her excitement level kind of grew throughout the fitting. Um, her dad pulled me aside there towards the end and told me that he thinks that she’s going to continue playing golf now after that fitting, which I mean, honestly, that’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard from a fitting standpoint. I mean, hearing that someone has kind of fallen back in love with the game through working with me, I mean, there’s there’s nothing more rewarding than that. 100%. you know, coming from two guys who clearly love the game of golf, it’s it’s good to to get people on on that side of things as well when we can in the in the fitting base. Um, another, I guess, fitting that kind of stuck out to me, it’s might be a little bit on the other end of maybe the golfer spectrum, uh, I was fortunate enough to fit a gopher hockey uh, player a couple weeks back and super awesome dude. Uh it was just a fun fitting to kind of you know relay stuff back and forth just hearing his experiences playing you know division one high level hockey um high level high school hockey all that US USA juniors so just a world I had never heard of but getting into more of the the fitting specs uh you know definitely a high-speed player because he’s division one college athlete uh but delivered the club with with very little dynamic loft at impact. Uh, so we went with a little bit of maybe a unicorn for a for a higher speed player, but we got him into the T250 launch spec. We made sure to uh add the heavier weight in there as he is swinging that that club pretty fast and being a little bit more of a lightweight head, but he was hitting everything. We got peak height over 100 feet on average or close to at that coming in I think with the gamer was around 55. So land angle up towards that 4550 number. Uh, and then just a ton of spin coming off the T250 uh, Launchp irons paired up with the the new Project X red uh, rifle shaft actually. So, little lighter weight there, but still providing plenty of stability for him as he Yeah. I mean, he’s he swung hard at that club. So, I’m assuming he was pretty steep on the ball then. Yes. Attacking his attacking was Yeah, it was anywhere from about five to seven. Okay. Yeah. So, he definitely needed some help getting the ball up in the air. Yep. And being a, you know, a hockey player, very good at compressing that golf ball. So, we just had to use some of that compression to go up into the air. But, yeah, it was I mean, stopping on a dime, putting it in a a water bucket from about 185. It was awesome. Funny enough, my uh one of my most memorable fittings from this past year was actually the exact opposite. I had a guy come in where his land angle was preposterous. I mean, we were almost in the 60° range for land angle to start. Sure. Uh he was using a set of Blueprint S’s at the time, which he had kind of bought off the shelf. He knew the specs he was somewhat looking for. I mean, he was in extra stiff cuz I mean, his club head is off the chart. I’m talking like 105 miles an hour with the seven iron. So, just a freaking nature really. Yeah. But his spin rate was exceeding 8,000 on some shots. Uh, so really, we just need to manage that height cuz the peak height got up to 180 ft on a couple of those. Yeah, the carry was pretty good. I mean, it was still at about 210 if you cut a good one, but I mean, if it if you got a spinny one, it was 180. So, really no distance control there. Sure. Uh, we ended up going in the Stricks ZXI7 head, which for any players out there with a ton of speed, it’s a great head for you because it it manages spin pretty well, even for a steeper player. So, we did those one degree strong. And then we also put Caper 130X’s, which if anyone knows iron shafts out there, that is about as stiff and low launch as you can possibly get. That it is. And then we hardstepped them. So, we built him the lowest launching, lowest spinning option possible. Yeah. But the most important thing really was his consistency of spin and of ball speed. So he’s one of the rare players where I was actually looking for an iron that would help us decrease ball speed because if we minimized his spin but maintain the ball speed of where it was at. I mean his seven iron was going to go 230 yards which creates a lot of gaps in the bag when it comes down to the wedges there. So we got his carry pretty consistently right around 210 landing angle at 54 degrees. Honestly, that was probably one of the times I felt more accomplished in a bay was just helping someone with that level of speed where I mean, from a physics standpoint, there’s only so much you can do in terms of bringing ball fight down, but we got him in a window that he was much more comfortable with. Yeah. You know, that’s a a fitting where you’re really like digging in, you know, the full bag of tricks to try to figure it out cuz you don’t often get somebody hitting the ball that high or at least swinging a seven iron over 100 miles an hour. Absolutely. Uh yeah, that’s very cool. Um I would say on that line of things, I was fortunate enough to fit a couple guys that were kind of working their way up through the the PGA Tour America. Um so had conditional status. Uh it was three guys. They were super awesome, but you know, obviously very high speed players. Y somewhat robotic in how they swung it. you know, is like a bad shot to him was moving, you know, 25 feet right on a fade, whereas, you know, a bad shot for myself is probably moving about 75 yards, right? Um, but it was just, it was very cool to get so picky about what was happening with the golf ball. Yeah. Um, the one gentleman I fit for driver, we got him into the GT2. We initially had it at 10° cuz he wanted a little bit more spin. Um I was fortunate enough to play golf with him actually the next day. So we kind of did an onc course fit and we both noticed that when he hit one maybe slightly spinny it was going about 200 feet in the air. So we had to come back in the next day. We dropped loft down to eight. I think we played it at 8 and 3/4 and the the B4 setting maybe C4 actually now that I think about it. Um, and I mean it was just a cut that was carrying about 330 and rolling out to 350 every time. Peak height of about 100 yards or 100 yards. 100 feet uh in the air. So it was much better than the the spinny 200 feet. Yeah. That were stopping at about 260 for them. But these guys were really good at golf. It was just a cool you kind of like you said when you get the polar ends of the the fittings that you have coming in. Um, I mean, these guys are just, they’re really good at golf and it was fun to watch. That sounds like a dream, honestly. Just being able to go out with your fitting afterwards and kind of see the work that you put in and being able to tweak it if you need to. Um, I was fortunate enough to play or to fit a a highle golfer this summer as well. We actually did a video series with him, Jake Olsen from South Dakota. Yeah. Um, fit him into P7 CB MB combo set there and then an elite triple diamond driver. Um, it was definitely unique fitting where we really were looking to more manage spin with his irons than anything where there was an iron out there that had a a more consistent dispersion pattern, but the spin rate is a lot lower and he was really worried about flyer. So, we went with an option that actually had a slightly larger dispersion chart, but the spin was much more consistent, thus the distance was more consistent. Um, and it was really cool to see how he performed in the summer after that fitting as he won the South Dakota match play and the South Dakota state amter. So, being able to see that a player that I worked with went on to accomplish something that high of a level was just really really cool to see and uh yeah, just a proud moment. Yeah, absolutely. It’s cool to see when you know the the clubs that you fit and the player that you fit ends up playing better with, you know, the equipment that you put in their hand. Yeah, it’s it’s fulfilling, right? Uh kind of along the same lines, the one of those guys on the PGA Tour Americas, he was playing in the Monday qualifier uh the next Monday up at Grand View or uh the layman course up in uh Brainard. Um didn’t end up qualifying, but he shot four strokes better than the last two Monday qualifiers. Uh and his he texted me after and said his driving accuracy was far better. So, you know, maybe not the result that that he was looking for, but still a bunch of things to build on. He’s I think he’s still 23 years old, so plenty of years to play high level golf, but just it’s cool to see that stuff come to to fruition and and people to improve with the the clubs you put in their hands. Yeah. I mean, that that’s just sounds like an awesome opportunity for you. I would say one thing that kind of just encapsulates all these stories here is we’re just working with a wide variety of golfers. Absolutely. If you want to come in and work with a fitter like Max or myself, just visit any of our store locations or visit secondswing.com to visit one of our online fitters. [Music]