Driver Fitting with YOUR Ball

[Clambake]

There are lot's of threads related to club fitting and people talking about their experiences getting fit for the right driver shaft and head combo, but I've never seen anyone discuss what golf ball they were using for the fittings.    My thinking is that club fitting starts from green backwards just the way one should strategize playing the course.     In club fitting this means finding the golf ball that you're most comfortable around the greens with - putting, chipping, pitching - and then fitting your irons and woods to have the optimal characteristics with that ball.

With the driver fitting, one is trying to determine the optimal spin and launch angle for your swing speed and swing characteristic such as ascending or descending at impact.    But since the different balls have quite different spin rates, it seems that being fit with a ball type that differs significantly from what you play with would yield very suboptimal results.   For example, if your driver fitting uses a low spin ball yet you normally use a high spin ball, then you'll find your tee shots ballooning on the course and not getting optimal distance.

However, every store I've seen driver fitting taking place they were just using miscellaneous balls, often mixing brands and types with different swings on the launch monitor.    This seems like bad science to me and I'll make sure I take my own brand into a fitting, but curious if in your experiences your fitter took this into account.

[TourSpoon]

I took the same approach that you did by working from the green back to the tee.  During my latest driver search I made sure that I used the ball in the launch monitor that I would use on the course, a Pro V1.  Since then, I have used the Gamer V2 with slightly better driver results, but haven't noticed anything spectacular.  To me, a lot of this fitting is marketing as many of us were able to find a ball that better fit our game through trial and error.

With today's marketing emphasis of ball fittings, shaft fittings, video analysis, hybrid clubs, and range finders, it is amazing that I ever broke 80 twenty years ago.  It is not that much easier today given all the "advantages".  Well, it is a little easier, but not as much as you would think it would be with all the advances in technology.