Wedge Fitting
Sixty minutes, one hundred fifteen dollars. The category where local conditions matter more than anywhere else in the bag.
Bounce Is Chosen Against Your Ground and Your Delivery
Bounce is the angle that keeps a wedge sole from digging into the turf. Too little and the leading edge burrows on soft ground. Too much and the sole bounces into the equator of the ball off firm lies. Neither failure is a technique problem, and neither one gets fixed by practising more.
The right number depends on two things: how steeply you deliver the club, and what the ground under your ball is like most of the time. In this market that second variable is unusually demanding, because Bexar County courses swing between soft overseeded winters and concrete-firm August fairways.
Grind Is the Second Half of the Answer
Grind describes material removed from the sole in specific places: heel, toe, trailing edge. It determines what happens when you open the face, which is the shot most golfers most want to be able to hit and most often cannot.
A wedge with a full sole and high bounce is superb on square-faced shots out of sand and useless once the face opens on a tight lie. A heavily relieved heel does the opposite. We test both off real lies rather than describing them at you.
Gapping Into the Iron Set
Modern iron sets have strong lofts, which has quietly created a chasm between the set pitching wedge and the first specialty wedge in a lot of bags. A forty-three degree pitching wedge followed by a fifty-four degree sand wedge leaves an eleven-degree hole, which on the course is a twenty-five yard yardage nobody can cover.
Every W-5 session starts by measuring the actual loft of your pitching wedge, because the number stamped on it is frequently not the number it is. That single measurement determines the whole wedge ladder above it.
Session Facts
| Code | W-5 |
|---|---|
| Length | 60 minutes |
| Fee | $115 |
| Fitter | Ruben |
| Groove recheck | Every 75 rounds |
Crushed Granite Is Not Beach Sand
A large number of courses around San Antonio and the Hill Country use crushed granite or a coarse local sand in their bunkers. It behaves nothing like the fine white sand that most wedge marketing assumes.
Firmer Base
Coarse sand compacts. A high-bounce wedge that glides through fluffy sand can skid off a compacted granite base and send the ball across the green.
Abrasive
Granite is harder on grooves and finishes than beach sand. Wedges played regularly out of it need their groove interval treated seriously, not as a formality.
Course Dependent
We ask where you play. Two courses fifteen minutes apart can call for genuinely different bounce, and building for the wrong one is a common and expensive mistake.
Fix the Short Game Gap
An hour on the wedges typically changes more strokes than any other single-category session.