The Rotary Swing Book

by Chuck Quinton

Getting a golfer to hit the ball straighter and more solid is something that I've had great success with as a golf instructor, but gaining my students as much as 40 yards off the tee is what puts the biggest smiles on their faces. After doing 3 months of exhaustive testing in the Spring of 2008, we settled on using the Nakashima HTec driver heads and almost exclusively Matrix shafts for fittings at my Rotary Swing Golf Academy in Orlando, Florida. We wanted to do our fittings with only the ABSOLUTE BEST equipment on the planet, no matter who it was made by and so we literally tested just about everything. Settling on the Nakashima and Matrix brands was quite honestly, a no-brainer.

To arrive at this conclusion involved an incredible about of testing. We hit over 300 different driver head and shaft combos during those three months using a Zelocity PureLaunch launch monitor (we now use a FlightScope Kudu). The results were shocking and even ridiculous at times. The spin rates that some "high end" shafts and heads marketed to the public as "low spin" and the "longest driver ever" were sometimes embarrassing. We were downright amazed at the differences that each combo produced. For instance, the Cleveland HiBore XL Tour and XLS were the two poorest performing drivers in terms of ballspeed out of all the heads we tested. For the average player we have fit, they have picked up about 6 mph of ballspeed switching to a Nakashima HTec head. Here's a good example of a student who switched to Nakashima over a HiBore (click here)... You can see that he picked up 15 yards of carry solely due to the higher ball speeds the Nakashima heads and Matrix shafts can produce. When we started adding the Matrix Shafts to the Nakashima heads, things started getting silly and our students started getting "Tour Pro" numbers with the driver. Take Hank Zachry for instance....

It was fun fitting Hank because he had tremendous clubhead speed but felt that he was leaving some distance on the table with his TaylorMade Burner with a custom fit Stulz shaft. Now, I like the Stulz shafts, they feel very smooth and seem to hit the ball quite straight. But, they do spin more than a comparable Matrix in our testing and for Hank it was no different. I fit Hank into a Nakashima HTec 9.5 with a Matrix F6M2 (he has 119+ mph per clubhead speed, but doesn't always find the sweetspot!) He puts a tremendous load on the shaft and is a hard swinging fellow. With the Matrix shaft, he picked up 7 mph of ball speed and lowered his spin rate from 3,066 to 2,834. This equated to an average drive of 297 yards vs 279 with his OEM setup. To say the least, he was pretty happy to pick up 18 yards off the tee! He's since called me and told me he's hitting 30 yards longer than in his old setup after settling into it. From here, we started bringing in other Matrix Ozik shafts, including the TP-7, TP-6 and most importanly, the XCon5.

The XCon5 is perhaps the best shaft ever made for the majority of golfers. For such a light shaft at around 57 grams, it produces incredibly high ball speeds and low spin rates when coupled with the Nakashima heads. It was the moment that we started carrying the XCon5 that the fittings started going nuts at the Golf Academy. Take Mike Williams fitting for example. Mike came to me using a Titleist 907 D2, you can see the results from Mike's fitting below:

Mike was carrying his Titleist driver with the V2 shaft 191 yards with an absurd 4,982 rpm's of spin and not hitting it straight at all, a pull-slice to be exact with 1,062 rpm's of side spin. We went through a few different Matrix XCon5 shafts and Nakashima heads to find the right combo. The first one in the screen shot above showed a boost in carry of 16 yards and reduction in sidespin of 768 rpm's! This is the difference between a gentle fade and huge slice, so this was very significant. As we moved down to a softer shaft, his backspin decreased even more, knocking off almost 1,700 rpm's of spin, but more importantly taking his sidespin down to a miniscule 66 rpm's, not enough to even see movement in the ball flight to the naked eye. However, Mike settled on the lower lofted head that gave him the most carry and the shaft that allowed him to actually draw the ball and gave him the tightest grouping on the range as can be seen in the screen capture below:

That tiny little yellow circle in the middle is Mike's grouping of shots with the XCon5 in a Stiff flex and the Nakashima Htec 460 in 9.5 degrees of loft. He cut his driver shot dispersion from a 44 yard radius to an 11 yard radius! Mike is not only now hitting 28 yards further with carry and roll, but hitting it in the middle of the fairway to boot! Given real, raw data like this and having dozens more fittings and hundreds of hours on the FlightScope launch monitor, it's pretty easy to see why we went with Matrix shafts!

If you want to pick up some serious distance and straighten out your misses, come see us for a driver fitting by clicking here!