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No matter the level of someone's golf equipment obsession, stepping into a vast golf store like PGA Tour Superstore has to get just about any golfer's heart beating a little faster.
The possibilities are endless: brand-new golf clubs, golf balls, apparel and accessories spread throughout warehouse-like square footage. Even browsing, with no intention to buy (okay, maybe just a Clearance rack shirt...or two...) can be exciting.
This week, GolfPass was treated to a next-level version of that kind of experience. We spent three days at the 12th annual PGA Tour Superstore Summit held at PGA National Resort in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., sampling new 2024 offerings from golf's major club manufacturers. The event took over the driving range and short-game facility beside the resort's famed Champion Course, annual host of the Cognizant Championship.
True to past years, PGA Tour Superstore brought in hundreds of representatives from its locations nationwide to learn about the new golf clubs coming out in 2024 and test them out before shipments arrive in the coming weeks. For the company's legion of club fitters, it was a chance to network, add to their knowledge base and generally nerd out about the newest offerings from Callaway to Mizuno, Titleist to Tour Edge.
Ahead of next week's industry-wide PGA Merchandise Show (watch this space for our annual reporting from Orlando), this was a multi-day Demo-Day-before-the-Demo-Day where GolfPass experienced an exclusive sneak peek.
We're still sworn to secrecy on certain details about a few brand-new golf club releases for 2024, but here's what we can tell you about what we saw:
These 5 new golf clubs piqued our interest at the PGA Tour Superstore Summit
New driver: TaylorMade Qi10
A new year means a new driver from the company that supplies Tiger, Rory and countless more pros, as well as tons of amateurs. With driver face and head technology pretty much maxed out from a distance perspective, TaylorMade's newest release focuses on forgiveness, with the Qi10 Max model achieving moment-of-inertia (MOI) scores of more than 10,000 across both vertical and horizontal face axes. In another nod toward straight-hitting, a thin white swath of paint at the top of the clubface serves as a novel alignment aid at address. - Tim Gavrich
New fairway woods/hybrids: Cobra DARKSPEED
The all-black look of the Cobra DARKSPEED fairway woods and driver is a sharp one that represents a big improvement from last year’s AEROJET. The fairway woods have a compact head with a good amount of weight, making me think they would be effective from all sorts of lies including the rough. The LS (lower launch and spin), X and Max versions all offer something slightly different, but I found each had a mid to high launch. - Drake Dunaway
New irons: Wilson Staff CB
The Wilson Staff CB and Blade irons have a super-clean look and a design that focuses on forgiveness and workability – something we all could use a little bit more of. Like many other manufacturers, the opportunity to create a hybrid set is something most golfers should take advantage of in their next big full-set purchase. The CBs for 3-iron through 7-iron and the blades for 8-iron through PW would be my choice. Just enough forgiveness for the long shots and maximum workability with the scoring irons (and the best aesthetics). - DD
New wedges: PING S159
For the last several years, PING has produced two distinct lines of its Glide wedges: one cast and one forged. This year sees the company streamline the offering to a single new series, the S159, officially available February 13. Driven by feedback from its stable of professional golfers and its decades of near-obsessive engineering acumen, PING seems to have found a winner, with clean looks, a slightly less rounded profile and an extensive array of grinds that will fit golfers across the range of contact patterns and course conditions. I've got my eye on a 52- and 58-degree, the latter in the low-bounce T grind. - TG
New putters: Callaway/Odyssey Ai One
Artificial intelligence is a society-wide buzzword nowadays, but credit Callaway for weaving AI insights into its R&D for several years now. Their latest collaboration with super-computing power has resulted in a new putter series, whose newly-engineered inserts enable them to claim 21% better performance on mishits than anything they've previously produced. - TG
Thanks to PGA Tour Superstore for the invite to this year's Summit. PGA Tour Superstore will be sponsoring some of GolfPass' Gear (golf equipment, apparel and accessories) coverage in 2024, including our monthly GolfPass Gear Report. For more information and to browse thousands of clubs, balls and all sorts of golf products for your own game, visit PGATourSuperstore.com.
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