Short Game
Wedge Fitting:
The Most Neglected Club in Your Bag
You track your driving distance. You obsess over your driver speed. But your wedges? Most golfers are playing wedges with specs pulled from guesswork and product guides, and that's costing them more strokes per round than anything else in the bag.
What Makes Wedges Different
Wedges are not like other clubs. The precision demands are different. With a driver, you have some forgiveness — mishits go longer and straighter than pure shots, which masks errors. Wedges punish everything. A wedge hit slightly thin, slightly fat, slightly off-center — all of those produce dramatically different results. A gap wedge hit thin goes 82 metres. Hit pure, same club, 105 metres. That's a 23-metre dispersion on mishits that feel similar.
Spin matters more in wedges than any other club. Your driver spin rate is a tuning parameter. Your wedge spin rate is a scoring parameter. When you're spinning a wedge 300 rpm less than you should be, you're not stopping the ball on the green. You're running it past the pin.
Bounce: The Spec Most Golfers Get Catastrophically Wrong
Bounce is the angle between the sole and the ground at address. Too little bounce and you skull wedges on any divot or firm contact. Too much bounce and you struggle to open the face, catch the ball thin, and lose distance control. The right bounce for your swing and the conditions you play in is not a guessing game — it's a fitting decision.
Why Wedges Get Neglected
Wedge fitting is neglected because it's invisible. Nobody sees you hit your 52-degree gap wedge on the range. The problem only shows up on the scorecard — the shot that checks up 5 metres short, the pitch that releases past the hole, the bunker shot that skulled into the water.
Wedges also suffer from "good enough" thinking. Your 7-iron goes 150. Your 9-iron goes 125. So your wedges must fill the gaps, right? Except if your wedges aren't fit to your actual attack angle and swing speed, the distances aren't actually gaps — they're overlaps or cliffs.
The One Thing Most Golfers Get Wrong
Spin loft. This is the angle between the club's face angle and its angle of attack at impact. Most golfers and most wedge fittings ignore this entirely. Spin loft determines how much backspin you generate, which determines how much stopping power you have on the green.
High spin loft — more angle between face and attack — generates more spin. Most recreational golfers with average attack angles need more spin loft than they think. That means either a more lofted wedge than they'd normally play, or a different shaft that promotes the attack angle needed for their desired spin characteristics.
The standard recommendation of "pitching wedge through sand wedge, 4-degree gaps" is not a fitting protocol. It's a manufacturing convenience.
The Fix
Get your wedges on TrackMan. Hit full shots, partial shots, and flops. Measure actual spin rates at different lofts with different shafts. See where your attack angle sits and what bounce windows work for your divot pattern.
Look at your current wedge distances. Are they tidy 10-14 metre increments? Or are there gaps and overlaps? Gaps and overlaps are equipment problems, not swing problems.
At Stick, we fit wedge specs the same way we fit everything — with data. Your attack angle, your typical conditions (hardpan or soft? links or parkland?), your turf interaction. None of that is guessable. It has to be measured and matched.
For South African golfers specifically: our firm winter conditions in the Highveld and the softer coastal turf in KwaZulu-Natal require different bounce and grind considerations. A wedge that works at Pearl Valley doesn't work at Zwartops. Fit for where you actually play.
Stop Giving Away Strokes.
Get Fitted.
The strokes you're losing to wedge imprecision are hiding in plain sight. Stop guessing. Get fit.
Book Your Fitting