10 Essential Items to Have in Your Golf Bag

In this video I run through the essential accessories and items you should carry in your golf bag… alongside your clubs. These are 10 must-have pieces of gear to bring with you out on the course to help you play your best. Enjoy!

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*Chapters*
02:18 – Balls
03:04 – Tees
04:06 – Glove
05:01 – Ball marker
05:39 – Towel
06:46 – Sun cream
07:14 – Food + drink
08:18 – Pitch repair tool
09:10 – Pencil
09:49 – Club cleaner
10:32 – Rangefinder

*Product links (no affiliate relationship)*

OceanTee tees: https://www.americangolf.co.uk/oceantee/shop-by/category/golf-tees/
FootJoy WeatherSof gloves: https://amzn.eu/d/4kk3b1m
Tri-Fold Golf Towel: https://amzn.eu/d/8xGAlpv
Club Cleaner Brush: https://amzn.eu/d/cCOiSYx
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Is it possible to take up golf late in life and still make it on tour? I’m embarking on a mission to go from golf rookie at 40 to tour pro at 50, doing everything I can to get good enough, quickly enough to qualify for the Legends Tour.

Follow my journey as I try to understand what drives sustainable improvement in golf, how quickly that improvement can come, and if this mad endeavour is even feasible.

Welcome to my Golf Life Crisis.

hello all welcome back to the channel uh slightly different one today uh obviously the purpose of this channel overall is to document my golfing journey but it’s also to help kind of beginner maybe intermediate golfers to learn from my process my mistakes the things I’m going through um and also to learn from some of the things that I wish I had known or that someone had told me when I was starting out and this video falls kind of into that latter category obviously I’m not going to be doing things like swing tips i’m in no position to be giving those out but in terms of everything else that might help your golf game would be that core strategy or practice planning or a number of the other videos that have gone out already or are to come um things that could help your game outside of mechanic swing that kind of stuff uh and so today we’re going to be looking at accessories that you want to be carrying with you out on the course now to be clear this isn’t about clubs or clothing um for now I’m just going to assume slash hope that you have clubs and are wearing clothing um but essentially this is about everything else that you might need to help your round go as well as possible and make the process of playing golf as enjoyable and seamless as possible it’s already stressful enough hopefully some of these things I’m going to run through today can take that stress level down just a little bit if you are new here then hello welcome i am Joel i took up golf late in life and I am looking at every possible way that I can make up for lost time and get as good as I possibly can as quick as I possibly can and on this channel as I say I am documenting that process and also looking at what sustainable meaningful golfing improvement looks like over time and what the best ways are to achieve that with the hope that I can do it and potentially some of you can too so today I’m going to run through the 10 must-have accessories to carry in your golf bag at any one time i have laid them out here very neatly from most to least important and I will run through them one by one now you probably need need maybe five or six of them but they are all pretty important they’re all pretty inexpensive so ideally take all 10 with you every time you step out onto the course number one fairly obviously balls to you um now I’m not going to tell you what balls you should be playing what balls you like to be playing that is a whole separate topic on which there is a slew of information out there and potentially a separate video in future the only recommendation I would make is don’t play Volvvic balls because people will laugh at you as I discovered firsthand in one of my first rounds of golf um but essentially you are obviously going to need golf balls of some description now the only real question is how many um the answer to that is just more than you will need unless you are planning to just stop playing golf forever after your next round you’re never going to stop needing them so essentially just pack as many as you think you can get through in a given round of golf and then maybe add a few more on top next up is TE’s now before anyone jumps in the comments yes you do need TE’s um if you are currently going around hitting your drivers solely off the deck you should probably stop doing that it is not as cool as you think and it’s definitely not good for your golf game now again personal preference when we’ll come into this in terms of what TE’s um heights etc i personally carry two different tea heights the castle TE’s for when I’m hitting driver just cuz that gives me an easy way to have a consistent height on the ball and then just the regular peg TE’s for everything else um but really up to you obviously you can just use these for driver and irons and just tee it up or down according to preference um but really you will need TE’s again just take more than you think you’ll lean on in a given round you will never stop needing them um as far as uh brands or anything like that the only real recommendation I would make is try to use the bamboo TE’s if you can rather than wood or plastic just from an eco-friendly perspective and if anyone cares the ones I use specifically are the ocean t okay next thing up is glove obviously again fairly elementary and again personal preference in terms of brand looks material all that kind of stuff um I’m fairly traditional so I just like white um and although I like the feel of the premium leather gloves I find they fall apart within a round or two so I have gone back to the synthetic material for a kind of nice midpoint of feel durability and aesthetics uh and kind of uh price as well i tend to go with the FootJoy weather soft gloves um but obviously there are a million options out there try and get whatever you’re going to be able to enjoy using will fit nicely and afford because you will have to replace it even with the synthetic ones synthetic ones fairly regularly if you are playing a decent amount of golf fourth up ball marker for marking your ball on the greens um you don’t necessarily need to use a golf specific ball marker for this coin or anything round and flat is going to be fine i checked this out and apparently according to the rules of golf anything artificial so not like twigs or leaves can be used as a ball marker um but if you are one of those people who’s like plunging a tea into the ground or a pitchfork to mark your ball maybe stop doing that just because we can doesn’t necessarily mean we should so ball marker coin anything round ideally flat and fairly heavy so it won’t get blown about in the wind number five towel now we are still for my money in the essential category here and that’s not just because I am something of a neat freak but golf is already hard enough there’s no need to make it harder by having mud balls or mud on your clubs or sand from your bunker shots or anything like that so please do bring a towel with you again tons of different options in terms of sizes colors materials patterns etc my preference is for the trifold towels which fold up like this and then clip on the side of your bag can obviously get magnetic ones that hang on the clubs or that drape over your bag i tend to find these are preferable as they don’t necessarily get in the way quite as much and just sort of make everything a little bit more neat and tidy out on the course but if you want something bigger more meaningful and meaty then of course you can get that as well i tend to find having a couple in rotation is helpful if you are playing a lot one of them maybe in the wash at any one time so buying two or three can be a good idea this was just from Amazon super inexpensive pack of two of these was I think something like £10 so you don’t have to spend a ton of money on them but it is something that you are going to want to bring with you right six sun cream um and no I am not your mother hey shut up you’re not my real mom i am aware of that but your mother was probably right you should wear sun cream and you should probably be wearing it more than you do i won’t blame this point but if you are outside any meaningful amount of time playing golf or really doing anything else please wear sunscreen if you are going to be playing golf for a meaningful amount of time over your life you will be very thankful that you did okay seven is food and drink now we’re probably in the not quite so mandatory category here um obviously food and drink is mandatory for living which is quite important but you probably would survive a round of golf without it although some water is generally a good idea but you also probably won’t play to your best so take something out with you uh and I try and eat fairly regularly out on the course so something like bananas protein bars nuts anything like that is going to be good and obviously water stay hydrated sports drinks etc um personally I like to have something every kind of four or five holes whether that’s banana half a protein bar or whatever it’s a good idea to just take something with you out on the course so that you’re prepared lots of courses don’t have halfway houses or huts or anything like that so better to come prepared with what you do need rather than relying on being able to get it when you’re either out on the course or from a clubhouse because then you will probably be having either a Snickers bar or a flapjack which has been there for the best part of a decade okay number eight this is a pit repair tool and no it is not a divot repair tool just to get one of my pet peeves out of the way divot is one of those lovely square strips of grass that you’re definitely taking with your iron shots and there’s no way that this is going to help you repair one of those um this is obviously for the pitch marks that you are definitely going to create loads of with your searingly accurate iron shots into greens um be nice take care of your golf courses use this to repair those pitch marks and do learn how to properly repair them rather than just gouging more holes in the green like you’re trying to harvest crops the reason this is not necessarily in the essentials category is because in a pinch you can use a tea but something like this that is designed for this purpose will just make the process a little bit quicker and a little bit easier okay into the home strait number nine pencil now in my experience there are two types of golfers ones who never ever have a pencil and one who have 19 pencils in the bottom of every pocket in their golf bag um neither is great but you probably want to be more of the latter than the former um this is obviously essential if you’re playing in any type of competitions because you will need to fill in and sign scorecards less mandatory if you’re just playing social rounds but good to have one uh and if you can have one with a rubber on the end so that you can alter your scores if you want to cheat uh if you make any honest mistakes and then number 10 on the least essential of the essentials list I’ve gone with the club cleaning brush like I said this is probably personal preference rather than anything else because I do like to keep my kit neat did you know I’m utterly insane um but this is a sort of retractable brush with various heads for scraping the dirt out of your irons and things like that um I’m not saying that clean grooves is going to make all the difference for a player of my middling standard but again something you can just get for a couple of quid off Amazon slip in your pocket while you’re playing a round of golf and whip it out whenever you need it or whenever you’ve got a bit of mud or sand in the grooves of your clubs so number 10 on the list is the club cleaning brush now honorable mention or number 10B uh I wanted to just shout out a rangefinder or any other kind of GPS device didn’t pop this in the top 10 because I thought some people would get salty about saying that an essential item was something like this which can be quite expensive but really golf being a game of distances and proximities it is sort of mandatory to know not just how far you hit your own clubs but how far you’re trying to hit them on any given shot so whether it is a laser rangefinder like this a GPS watch a GPS uh device you can put on your bag anything like that I would say a strong recommendation for some kind of yardage distance measuring device and there you have it 11 items that you should carry in your golf bag at all time 10 of which I have deemed essential because people seem to like lists of 10 things on the internet let me know if there is anything that I have missed or anything that’s on here that you don’t think should be drop a note in the comments and we can discuss and if you enjoyed the video or got any value out of it then I would love it if you would consider subscribing to the channel and I will see you in the next one