Most fitting data was gathered a mile lower than the ground you play. We measure here, correct for density altitude here, and write your specs on a card that still makes sense in August when the monsoon turns the fairways soft.
Loft charts, shaft recommendations and gapping tables are written for sea level. Play them unchanged out here and the top of your bag runs together while the bottom falls short.
Thinner air means less drag and less lift. The ball goes further and the backspin that would normally hold a green loses part of its grip. Two clubs that gap cleanly in Dallas can land twelve yards apart here, both of them long.
Between the river bosque and the West Mesa you meet three different surfaces in a single afternoon. Sole shape has to survive all of them, not just the one the wedge was photographed on.
Local bunker fill runs coarse and angular. It chews the face of a wedge faster than the soft imported silica most durability claims are based on, which shortens the honest life of a scoring club considerably.
A fitting is worthless if you cannot reconstruct it six months later. So the output of every session here is a single printed card, filled in by hand while you watch, and copied to you by email before you drive away.
It carries the raw numbers, the corrected numbers, the sole prints we pulled off the grass strip, and the exact build sheet if anything gets ordered. If you later buy a club somewhere else, the card tells that shop precisely what to match.
You do not need the whole bag looked at. Most players come in for one category, fix it, and come back the following season for the next one.
Sole shape and bounce chosen from ground evidence rather than from the number stamped on the hosel. Includes a face crest reading on every wedge you own.
Head style, shaft weight, length and lie built around where you actually strike the face, with gapping checked against corrected carry rather than the number on the sole.
Loft, face angle and shaft profile set for high-desert flight, where too much spin costs less than it does at sea level and too little costs a great deal more.
The clubs most often carried and least often used well. We test them off the deck on grass, never off a mat, because sole camber is the whole argument.
Where the long irons stop earning their place. We find the crossover point with numbers instead of pride, then set the loft so it does not collide with the wood above it.
Length, lie and balance measured against your eye line and stroke arc on a roll surface cut to the speed of the greens you actually play.
Before anything is hit, everything in the bag gets measured cold: loft, lie, length, swingweight, grip size and face condition. Roughly one visit in five ends here, because the fault turns out to be a set that drifted rather than a set that was wrong.
You hit your own clubs until the pattern stops moving. We throw out the warm-up, keep the median, and record the spread, because the spread is what tells us whether a change is real.
Head, shaft, length, lie, weight. Never two at once. It is slower and it is the only way to know which change did the work.
Raw numbers get adjusted for the day's density altitude, the card is filled in, and you get a copy. If nothing is worth ordering, the card says that too.
“I had been playing a 58 with almost no bounce because a magazine told me to twenty years ago. Marisol put a sole print in front of me and the argument was over in four swings.”
Dana W. — North Valley
“They talked me out of a new driver and into a shaft that cost a third as much. I have never had a shop do that before.”
Ramon E. — Rio Rancho
“The card is the part nobody else does. I took it to a shop in Denver on a trip and they matched my build off it in ten minutes.”
Kelsey N. — Nob Hill
Spray paint on a sole and fifteen swings on live grass will tell you more about the bounce you need than any chart printed on the back of a box.
Coarse local bunker fill ages a wedge face at a rate that makes national replacement advice optimistic by a season or more.
Spin loss on a damp face is not gradual. It holds, then falls off a shelf, and the shelf moves depending on how worn the face already is.
Scuffed grips, mismatched wedges, the driver you are not sure about. That is the useful version. Bays book out two to three weeks ahead through the spring.