Which Strikes We Discard, and Why We Tell You
Every fitting discards data. There is no other option — a shanked 7-iron is not information about a shaft. The question is not whether a studio filters, it is whether you are allowed to see the filter.
Give a fitter sixteen strikes with each of four candidate clubs and the freedom to decide afterwards which strikes count, and that fitter can produce a winner from any of the four. This is not a hypothetical about dishonest people. It happens through entirely well-intentioned judgement, one small decision at a time, and the person doing it usually cannot tell that it happened.
The mechanism
You watch a golfer hit a candidate you believe in. A poor strike comes off and you think "that one was not the club". You quietly do not count it. Later, with a candidate you are less optimistic about, a similar strike comes off and you think "that is what this club does". You count it.
Neither decision felt like cheating. Both were made in a fraction of a second on incomplete information. Applied across ninety minutes and four candidates, they produce a result that reflects the fitter's prior belief far more than the golfer's ball flight.
The defence is not better intentions. It is a rule fixed before the data arrives, so the decision cannot be influenced by which candidate is being tested.
Our rule, in full
Read out loud before your first recorded swing, applied identically to your current club and to every candidate. A strike is discarded when any of the following is true:
- Contact falls outside the centre 60 percent of the face. Measured by the optical unit, not judged by ear. Gear effect on a heel or toe strike distorts spin axis enough that the strike says more about where you hit it than about the club.
- The two capture systems disagree on spin by more than 400 rpm. Something is wrong with the capture on that strike and we do not know what. It goes.
- The two systems disagree on launch angle by more than 0.8 degrees. Same reasoning.
- You call it before the ball lands. One veto per block, no explanation required. You know what a genuinely bad swing feels like and you know it before the screen does.
That is the whole rule. It is short on purpose, because a rule with fifteen clauses reintroduces discretion through the back door.
The discard count is the finding
This is the part golfers find most useful once it is pointed out. The sheet reports accepted versus attempted for every candidate. Two clubs can produce nearly identical averages while one kept twelve strikes of sixteen and the other kept seven.
Those are not similar clubs. The second one is producing a wider spread of contact and a higher rate of capture disagreement, which in practice means it is harder for you to hit consistently. The averages hid that completely, and the discard count made it obvious in one line.
We have had sessions where the candidate with the best numbers had the worst acceptance rate, and the recommendation went to the second-best club on averages. That decision is only defensible because the counts are on the page where you can see them.
The one-veto rule
Worth explaining, because it is unusual. Golfers get one discard per block that requires no justification. You felt it, you call it, it goes.
We added this in the second year for a practical reason. Without it, golfers would try to explain a bad swing to the fitter mid-block — "that one was my fault, I came over the top" — which interrupts rhythm, invites the fitter to make exactly the judgement call this whole system is designed to prevent, and puts the golfer in the position of arguing for their own data to be thrown out.
One free veto removes all of that. It is limited to one per block so it cannot be used to construct a highlight reel, which is the failure mode in the other direction.
What we do not discard
Strikes that are simply bad. A well-centred strike with a poor path and an ugly result is real information about how you deliver that club, and it stays in. So does anything that merely disagrees with the fitter's expectation.
The rule keys on capture quality and contact location, never on the outcome. A strike is never discarded because it produced a number somebody did not like.
Ask this question anywhere
If you are fitted somewhere else, ask two things: what is the rule for discarding a strike, and how many were discarded for the club you are recommending. A studio that has thought about this will answer immediately. A studio that has not will describe a process where the decision is made after each swing by a person watching, which is precisely the situation this note is about.