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Golf Trends That Are Likely To Become A Normality
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Apr 1, 2025
Just when it looks like golf equipment manufacturers have have run out of ideas, a handful of new ideas seem to pop up out of nowhere. Admittedly, some are better than others, but last year has been a particularly good year for fans of innovative golf gear so in this video, Joe Ferguson runs through the five golf gear trends from last year that he thinks are here to stay!
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0:00
As an equipment tester, innovation in the golf industry never fails to surprise me
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Just when you think they've invented everything, something new comes out. Now, some of these innovations are better than others, and some stand the test of time
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2024 has been a particularly good year for innovation, so in this bag
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I've got five gear trends that I think are here to stay. Okay, mini drivers. Now, you might be thinking, that's not a new gear trend, Joe
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and you're probably right. TaylorMade have been making their variations of it for a few years
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but what I'm talking about is it's really picked up momentum in 2024
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Players like Mickelson have been using one for a while. Tommy Fleetwood loves his Mini Driver
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Even Rory McIlroy was testing earlier in the year. The two models I've got here are the TaylorMade Burner Copper Mini Driver
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and I've got the new AI Smoke Mini Driver from Callaway. Now, they do two quite different things, but they're both very versatile
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Now, a lot of people get confused about what the Mini Driver is for, and I think it's very, very player dependent. As a PGA professional, I've started to see a lot of my
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peers popping a mini driver in tournaments where things tighten up a little bit as a pure driver
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alternative. Some people might think that's not a great idea with a higher handicap. You might want
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that extra shaft length to get your speed up and you might want the extra head size to use as a
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driver. Well, in that instance, you can think about it as a large, friendlier three-wood. The
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footprint's a lot bigger, which I'll show you in a second. If I put down the tailor-made mini driver
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there in behind the ball that feels like double the size of a standard three-wood. Now both of
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these models come in 11.5 and 13.5 degree options and you can loft them up on the loft sleeve so you
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can actually get them to a pretty standard three-wood loft and you've just got a tiny bit of
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extra shaft length and you've got that extra mass behind the ball. So I think this trend is here to
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stay and for me as a higher speed player I see it as that driver alternative. So I've got mine at 11.5
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lofted down just a fraction, just a shade over 10.5, and on tight holes like this
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I find it really really useful a nice penetrating ball flight and it helps me find a lot more fairways and I think this is a trend that here to stay Another gear trend that I think is here
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to stay, in fact, no, I'm going to go a step further, I think is the future of putters
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is lie angle balance. Now, I've got with me here the LabGolf DF3 putters and LabGolf are the early
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adopters of lie angle balance. It's their name, Lab, L-A-B, lie angle balance. What is a lie
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angle balanced putter, I hear you ask. Well, you might have heard the term toe, hang, and face
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balance before. Lie angle balanced putters sit kind of with the toe up. If I don't touch that
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shaft and I leave it to orientate itself, see how the toe of the putter stays up? That is lie
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angle balanced. If you've seen any of the social media stuff from LabGolf in their revealer
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that orientation allows the club face to stay square to the path throughout the stroke without
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any manipulation. That's something I really, really like. I think in years to come, people
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are actively going to wonder why we ever manufactured putters that wanted to actively
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rotate away from square to the target. In my head, that doesn't make much sense. Tiger likes it
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but Tiger's a particularly special athlete that I think maybe we shouldn't all necessarily model
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ourselves on. For me, it really simplifies things if the putter blade wants to stay square
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When you're on short putts in particular, assuming you've got the right read and the right alignment
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that putter blade just wants to stay square to the target it doesn't want to rotate
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away from square and that really helps with your start line it's something I'm really passionate
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about and I genuinely think that is the future of putting and that is a gear trend that's here to
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stay. Okay while we are on the putting green I've got another gear trend for you to do with putting
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that I think is here to stay from 2024 and those of you who listen to the Kickpoint Golf Gear
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podcast from Golf Monthly, we know I've got a bit of a weird fascination with grips and this is to
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do with the putter grips. In my hand, I've got the Golf Pride Reverse Taper Grips. Now, these were
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released this year and to me, it just makes perfect sense. We spend a lot of time with putting
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technically trying to remove that bottom hand from the game trying to slow it down and give it less power over the stroke but we been using grips for years that are either tapering from wider to thinner down to the bottom end which tends to give that
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right hand or the lower hand in your putting stroke more power, or we're using perfectly
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parallel grips which companies like Superstroke have been doing for some time, which has really
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really helped. But Golf Pride this year have engineered a reverse taper grip. In fact
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they've engineered three reverse taper fits. We've got the round, we've got the pistol
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and we've got the flat. They go the opposite way, as you can imagine. Thinner at the top
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and they get thicker down the bottom. When you think about it, if we've got something thicker
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in that bottom hand, most of us know that thicker grips tend to deactivate hands a little bit
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When we've got something thicker in the bottom hand, that's got to be good for our stroke
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I've tested, obviously these aren't on a putter, but I've tested these out quite significantly, and I've had some really, really good results. I've actually got one on my
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game of putter at the moment. I feel like I can talk with some authority on the topic
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It really does quiet down that bottom hand. It's really helping me hit my start lines more often
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Again, I think this is a gear trend that's going to be with us for a long, long time. I've come down the fairway here off that lovely Mini Driver T-Shop, one of my other trends
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to talk to you about another trend that I think is here to stay, and that is full face grooves
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Now, we've seen full face grooves for a number of years on wedges like the tailor-made high-toe
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wedges, various Callaway iterations, but not so much on irons. And I think it is something that
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we really need to consider. So I've got with me here, the Cleveland Halo XL full face irons. Now
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when you first look at it, it is a visual that takes a little bit of getting used to
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but when you dig into it, you dig into the science and the tech behind it, it makes perfect sense. Firstly, from a spin point of view, why would you not want to standardize the
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spin on heel and toe strike. Sometimes if you hit a very extreme toe strike on an iron
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and you're hitting no grooves, you're going to get a very strange, low spinning flight
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So why would you not extend those grooves all the way to the edge of the face
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Secondly, we're always looking to save weight in irons. Now, there's not going to be masses of saving
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just by milling extra grooves from there to the edge of the club but there will be some And every little milligram you can save in the club head can be redistributed elsewhere to increase MOI and put the CG where you
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want it. Now, for me, again, like I've said, it's been in wedges for a little while, but I don't
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know why it's not across the board commonplace. When you think about it, it makes no sense. Why
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would we ever stop the grooves there? I think sometimes in golf, we're very much victims of
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just accepting things how they've always been and not questioning it. For me, and I'm just going to
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hit one away for you here, the full face grooves in irons is something I think is here to stay
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Also, I think it's going to be across the board commonplace in wedges before too long
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Another trend that is 100% here to stay are 3D printed golf clubs. Cobra have been leading the
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on this front. They've had putters out for a little while and what I've got in my hands here
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is a beautiful Cobra limited 3D printed iron. Now, 3D printing has been used a lot in prototyping
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speeding up the prototyping process and people checking out what designs they're going to bring
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to market. But this is really the first consumer available 3D printed iron and I've tested this
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quite extensively and the feel is extraordinary. I'm not going to get into all of the tech because
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that's for another video. Basically, what Cobra have done here is they've created a player-looking
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iron with about as much game improvement technology as in any other club I've ever tried. It's quite
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extraordinary. If Bryson DeChambeau is to believe, and this is quite a terrifying thought, before too
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long, 3D printers at home, you could be sat there with an idea in your head watching the golf, head
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to your garage, and you could be prototyping your very own irons and wedges before too long and have
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them almost hittable within a day or so, pop a shaft on and go and test out a new concept
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down the golf course. Now, that's a terrifying thought for some of my friends who've got some
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really wacky ideas, but it's also exciting for the innovation in the golf industry. I
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think that's something to keep an eye on moving forward. If the feel of these is anything
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to go by, then we're in for a really nice treat in the future with some of these 3D-printed
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golf clubs
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