Bounce is chosen against your turf, not against a chart
Charlotte keeps fourteen labelled buckets of sand on a shelf, collected from courses around central Indiana. Before she picks a grind for you, she asks where you play and pulls the matching bucket. Published bounce charts cannot do that.
Bounce is a relationship between your delivery and the ground
Every wedge recommendation you have ever read online is missing half the equation. Bounce and grind interact with two things: how steeply you deliver the club, and what the surface underneath the ball actually is. Change either one and the correct answer changes.
The delivery half is measurable and we measure it — attack angle, dynamic loft, and how much the sole is actually presented to the ground at impact. The surface half is not measurable in a bay, which is why we brought samples of the surface into the bay.
A golfer at a course with soft, fine bunker sand and lush spring rough needs a different sole from someone playing a firm municipal track with coarse, shallow sand over hardpan. Both of those courses are within twenty minutes of this building.
The sand library exists because the alternative — picking a mid-bounce wedge and hoping — produces a club that works acceptably nowhere.
The session covers four shots, because a wedge has four jobs
A club fitted only on full swings will be wrong for three-quarters of its working life.
Full swing
Distance, spin and descent for the gap map. This is where the gapping between your shortest iron and your highest-lofted wedge gets settled.
Partial swing
Half and three-quarter shots, where spin consistency and turf interaction matter far more than peak numbers. The most common miss on the course lives here.
Greenside, tight lie
Off the closest-cut surface we can produce. Leading-edge shape and effective bounce decide whether the club skips into the ball or digs behind it.
Bunker
In the sand from your course. Sole width, camber and heel relief all show up immediately and none of them show up anywhere else in the session.
| What happens | Likely cause | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Fat shots from tight fairway lies | Too much bounce, or heavy shaft-lean compensation | Lower bounce with heel and toe relief |
| Thin shots from soft or fluffy lies | Too little bounce for a steep delivery | Wider sole, more effective bounce |
| Bunker shots come out low and hot | Leading edge digging in fine sand | More bounce, wider sole for that sand |
| Bunker shots leave the ball in the sand | Sole bouncing off firm, shallow sand | Less bounce, narrower sole |
| Inconsistent spin on partial shots | Groove wear or a shaft too light for the head | Groove check first, then a heavier wedge shaft |
| Two wedges going the same distance | Loft gapping, not technique | Bend or replace one, re-map the set |
Two things wedge fittings usually skip entirely
Wedge shafts get inherited and should not be. Most golfers carry whatever the wedge shipped with, which is frequently lighter than their iron shafts and produces a club that feels disconnected from the set. A wedge shaft the same weight as or slightly heavier than your 9-iron shaft often improves partial-shot consistency more than any head change available.
Groove condition is measured, not eyeballed. Grooves wear from the face centre outward and the loss is gradual enough that nobody notices it happening. A wedge two seasons past its useful groove life will show a spin drop on the partial-shot block that no amount of fitting can recover. We check before we fit, because otherwise the session recommends a solution to the wrong problem.
If your grooves are gone, we will tell you and the recommendation is simply a new wedge of the same specification you already have. That is a cheap, boring, correct answer and we give it several times a month.