Hello and welcome to this week's newsletter.

 

After Aaron's trip to PING last week, John Roberts, Mark Reeve and I ventured down to the Callaway fitting centre at Chessington. The Callaway set up is quite different to most fitting centres as it's all done indoors rather than on a range. One thing this allows you to do is use top quality golf balls which gives a more accurate reading on the Trackman launch monitor.

We all took it in turns to have our swing speed, launch angle, spin rate, ball speed, smash factor and various other stats measured to find clubs which would help optimise our ball flights. 

   

The results were impressive. John and I added an extra 10 yards on our 7 irons, Mark added a bit more, but the impressive thing with him was how his flight changed and how much tighter the dispersion and distance control became.

   

After the irons we had a go with the drivers and fairway woods. Mark improved his dispersion with their new driver, I improved my distance, but the biggest improvements were made by John who stuck and extra 19 yards on his drive! As Mark and I heard all the way home, this ranked him as the biggest improver so far this year at Callaway.

  

All in all it was good day out, what I liked was the professionalism of the fitter there who didn't try the hard sell. If the clubs you had couldn't be bettered, he didn't try and pull the wool over your eyes and didn't recommend changing them. On top of that Callaway don't charge for the fitting day! 

If anyone would like to go down to Callaway for a club fitting please enquire in the Pro Shop, or click here to get in touch. 

We have a demo day arranged with Callaway for the end of March which will be a great opportunity for you to try out the latest products! Watch this space for more information.

Click here to find out more about Callaway's brilliant hardware range.

Next week is Sarah's turn as she goes to Titleist.


 

Saffron Walden members cleared up most of the prizes at the Thetford Pro Am on Thursday this week! 

We had 3 pairs in the top 3 Am-Am prizes, and PGA Professional Sarah and Morag finished 2nd in the Pro Am. 

Although a cold start to the morning and the greens were frosted over, starting out with an eagle was a great surprise on the 1st hole! 

The weather got better, the sun came out and Sarah finished by shooting +3 which left her in tied 5th place for the individual Pro score. 

Sarah's playing partner Morag played a very steady round not missing a fairway, and together they shot -6! 

Good Luck to Aaron next month.


 

The take away is a very important part of the back swing, it can make a lot of difference to a swing path and plane- this will make a difference to the ball flight.

Common faults with a take away which is on the inside means the club becomes trapped, therefore not having a direct path bath to the ball- taking it over or under plane. A classic example of this is a figure of 8 swing.

A take away which is too far on the outside of the line can generally lead to an upright swing, usually resulting in an out to in swing path and slicing the shot (ball flies left to right). However for better and stronger players it creates too much width and the club can drop on the inside on the way back into the ball.

      

Things to check with the take away: 

- The toe of the club is pointing towards the sky. 
- The club is parallel to the feet line.

Keep the takeaway smooth to make sure you start the swing on the correct line, it will work in an arc shape to get to a correct swing plane.

Click here to let us know how you get on with this week's tip.