How does a tour player with no equipment deal decide what clubs to play?

Some of the biggest names in the game are deciding to skip being tied down in an equipment contract in favour of the freedom of being able to pick which equipment to use. But with so much choice how does a free agent decide what clubs to play? Sergio Garcia recently shocked the golf world when he was spotted using Ping clubs in Abu Dhabi before announcing his split from Callaway after two years together. For the Spaniard, there are a number of factors.

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“For me, obviously feel is important but it’s got to start looking good,” he explains. “If it doesn’t look good, I’m not going to be able to play it, even if it’s the best club in the world.

“Then, when I test it, it has to feel good and I have to see some good numbers with it. It’s as simple as that.”

You would think with so much equipment out there it would be hard to know where to start. Garcia, , disagrees.

“I had an idea of what I wanted to try,” he says. “I tried TaylorMade and Ping and I thought some of the other manufacturers, from what I’ve seen out there, didn’t quite suit my eye.

“I had an idea of trying those, and I did and I got a little mixed bag of those two, actually.”

Now I don’t know about you, but if I had equipment brands sending me clubs left, right and centre, I would spend a lot of time checking out my options and switching clubs in and out of the bag. So will Garcia be the same?

“I’m sure as the year goes on, I might do a little tweak here or there,” he says. “But not too much – I’m pretty happy with the way things are.”

Finally, how easy is it to just switch into a full bag of new gear?

“I’m fairly comfortable,” Garcia admits. “I had some good practice sessions throughout Christmas and the New Year. So you know, it’s been feeling quite well. It’s just a matter of kind of getting a bit more used to it as the year goes on, but for the most part, you know, it feels quite good and I’m happy the way it went today.

Right, that’s enough for now, if you want to find out about more players who have made the switch into new gear for 2020 I’ve given you all the details here.

If you have any questions, feel free to let me know in the comments below or you can tweet me.