The Fitters

Four People, Two Bays, One Argument We Keep Having

The argument is about how much distance a mid handicapper should trade for dispersion. Nobody here has settled it, which is roughly the point. What everyone does agree on is that the answer is not the same for a twelve and a twenty-four.

Rowan Deakins

Owner and lead fitter

Spent eleven years on the floor of a large golf retailer, the last four of them running its fitting bays, before deciding the ranking software was doing more harm than good. Rowan handles most iron and driver sessions and is the reason every appointment starts with scorecards. He is unshakeable on one point: a club that produces a great average and two unplayable misses is not a good club for a bogey golfer.

Best match for: full bag sessions, set makeup arguments, anybody who has been fitted before and was not convinced.

Teri Okonjo

Short game and wedge fitting

Came out of greenkeeping rather than retail, which is why she reads turf better than anyone here. Nine seasons on maintenance crews at two courses in the region taught her exactly how a sandy base changes between April and August, and she fits bounce as a seasonal range instead of a fixed number. Teri runs the grass tee slot and will reschedule a wedge fitting rather than do it on a mat.

Best match for: chunked pitches, bunker trouble, anyone whose wedges came free with an iron set.

Marcus Halloran

Build bench and assembly

Twenty-two years of clubmaking, six of them in a components warehouse where he pulled and rebuilt several thousand clubs. Marcus does not run fittings. He builds what the fittings specify, and he is the reason the tolerance on a set leaving here is tighter than what most factories ship. If your swingweights come back matched to half a point, that is him.

Best match for: reshafting your own heads, swingweight matching, anything with a tricky ferrule.

Priya Raval

Putter fitting and scheduling

Runs the calendar and the parts orders, and took over putter fitting four years ago after getting quietly obsessed with stroke arc measurement. She is the one who will tell you that your putter is two inches too long and that the two inches are worth more than a new head. Priya also handles every quote that leaves the building, so if a number was written down, she wrote it.

Best match for: three-putt problems, putter length and lie, quotes on a rebuild.

How We Keep Each Other Honest

Every completed fitting gets reviewed by somebody who was not in the bay. It takes ten minutes, it happens on Wednesdays with the build work, and it exists because a fitter alone in a room with a launch monitor can convince themselves of almost anything. Twice a year that review has caught a recommendation drifting toward a shaft one of us simply likes.

We also re-fit each other. Once a season, everybody on the bench goes through a full session run by a colleague, blind to the components. It keeps us aware of how it feels to be on the other side of the counter, and it has occasionally produced the mildly humbling discovery that one of us had been playing the wrong lie angle for a year.

The equipment in this building can be bought by anybody. The reason to come here is that four people argue about what to do with it.

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