I’ve always chuckled quietly at guys claiming they can blast their tee shots 300 yards when you know those drives aren’t going any more than 260 and quite often off the fairway.
Those giggles are a thing of the past. I was humbled myself after spending a couple of hours with Warren Mape of Ping Golf Canada, who put me through an indoor fitting session recently with the new AFS (Advanced Fitting System) Fitting Cart and nFlight software.
Going into what became a healthy workout, Mape asked how far I hit my driver and seven iron.
The answers that I honestly thought to be true were debunked quickly by the nFlight software, which displays information such as carry, roll, angle of descent, sidespin, backspin, clubhead speed and ball speed.
“The software also features a gapping analysis that can help you fit your whole bag,” said Mape, adding that nFlight adapts today’s technologies and further enhances Ping’s reputation as an innovator in clubfitting.
All of that information is projected into a simulated ball flight that bruised my ego slightly because the ball was falling short of my estimation, but it was all in the good cause of finding a club that would help lengthen my shots.
Distance has always been the greatest challenge for somebody who knows that, once he tries to muscle a shot, the ball sprays all over, so power is sacrificed for accuracy in my case.
I knew that going into what turned out to be a rather entertaining session with Mape, courtesy of the nFlight software, which offers some pretty cool graphics that duplicate golf course conditions such as shadows, rippling water and wind.
It was such fun that, at the end of the situation, I suggested to Mape that the software be expanded so people can just play indoors from now on, an idea that he immediately shot down.
“The whole idea of this is to get you on a golf course and shoot better scores,” he said. “In terms of fitting, a large directive of ours was to be able to have an indoor fitting rival an outdoor fitting. We didn’t want an indoor fitting to be construed as not as good as an outdoor fitting.”
Of course, hitting into a net has always been thought of as an inferior way of fitting someone because of the inability to watch the entire ball flight from start to finish. That disadvantage began to disappear with the introduction of launch monitors, which now work in conjunction with the nFlight softwear.
“Now, I can see the ball flight,” said Mape. “It’s simulated, but I know that, because of the softwear and its capability of drawing from launch monitors, it’s accurate, so it’s depicting the actual ball flight on a screen, but in addition to that, I’m getting numbers. I’m getting a lot of data that I won’t get in an outdoor fitting.
“I can see that I’m drawing the ball, but can I see that my shot bend is four yards or 12 yards? This will tell me,” he said, adding that you can see the ball flight from all angles. “You can see top view, side view. It’s showing me dispersion from an overhead view of three different clubs I hit.”
The nFlight software came from a group of non-traditional types in the golf world, who Mape adds grew to like the game as they worked on the project.
“We pulled them from various resources,” he said. “One guy used to work on high end console games, so some very qualified animation and graphics simulation specialists,” he said.
“Some of them came from a different world than the golf world. They were thrown into the golf world by fire really and, in order to be able to understand what they were trying to accomplish for us, they needed to understand the game.
“To their credit, they really dove in and really fell in love with golf. They all were golfers in the end and to this day. To see them behind a computer, then transitioning to being out in the sun on a range, hitting golf balls in Arizona as part of their research, it must have been a refreshing change for them.
“When they first showed us the beta version of this, though it was a work in progress, we were very happy. Graphically, it was exactly what we wanted to see. It’s always been a work in progress from the first version we saw a year ago to what it is today.
“Greg Swartz heads up that group and has been so instrumental in turning our vision into fruition,” said Mape.
Enhancing the nFlight softwear is the AFS Fitting Cart, the latest in the evolution of Ping’s emphasis on fitting with its interchangeable capabilities, compared to the fixed nature of previous carts.
“The AFS cart has infinitely more combinations. There’s probably more of an 80 to 90 per cent chance that the player will hit the exact clubs in terms of length, lie angle, model. There’s a lot more flexibility in the shaft, shaft lengths, colour codes,” said Mape, adding that the AFS is only the latest in Ping fitting.
“Let’s make something clear,” he said. “Our 40-club fixed fitting cart is not obsolete. It’s still a very good solution and probably is the only viable solution in a lot of environments.
“It continues to fit people successfully and it will be a staple of our fitting programs, but we’re just trying to give more options to be able to accommodate more kinds of accounts into our fitting program.”
The distribution of nFlight softwear and the AFS Fitting Cart will be limited at the beginning. Mape says Ping is working to make the softwear compatible with most launch monitors and laptops. Future options to the AFS cart could be interchangeable driver and iron bags.
