Build your fourteen over the winter: a carry chart, two faults to find, and the club to swap

Many Canadian courses close for the colder months, and that closed season is the best time to fix the makeup of your bag. You are not buying anything in November. You are collecting numbers, and the numbers usually show that the set you own has one club too many at the top and one missing near the bottom.

Rule 4.1b lets you start a round with fourteen clubs and no more. It does not say you need fourteen, and it certainly does not say the fourteen that came in a boxed set are the right ones. What follows is a winter project: measure what each club really carries, find the holes in the list, and change one or two clubs before the courses open in April.

Step one: a carry number for every club

You need a written carry distance for each club, from driver down to your highest-lofted wedge. Use carry, not total distance, because roll depends on the ground and your approach shots are decided by where the ball lands.

Hit ten balls with each club, drop the two longest and the two shortest, and average the six that remain. That is the number you can count on, rather than the one you remember from a firm August fairway.

In Canada, you can do this all year round:

• Indoors, by the minute. The Golf Dome at the National Golf Academy in Calgary has 32 double-decker stalls in a 350-foot building and charges 60 cents per minute per station, with unlimited balls. Up to four golfers can share a station, so two friends can split the cost of a full-bag session.
• Indoors, by the hour, with Trackman. FORE! Indoor Golf runs Trackman simulators at three Toronto locations. Its summer 2026 hourly rates are $20 at Mimico, $25 at Leaside and $30 at Leslieville, and members can book around the clock. An hour is enough time for ten swings with every club.
• Outdoors, by the bucket. Calgary’s municipal ranges at Confederation Park, McCall Lake and Shaganappi Point sell 25 balls for $5, 50 for $10 and 100 for $15. Two large buckets cover the whole bag, but without a launch monitor you will need a rangefinder and target flags to read carry.

If you use the Golf Canada App, its December 2025 update lets you log practice sessions and rounds at participating Golf Canada member simulator facilities, so your winter numbers stay with your on-course stats.

Step two: correct for Canadian air

A carry chart built in a heated bay in February is not the chart you will play with on a cold April morning. In a Trackman study published by GOLF.com, teacher Andrew Rice found that golfers lose about two yards per club for every 10°F drop below 75°F. His driver example went from 250 yards at 75°F, about 24°C, to 242 yards at 35°F, about 2°C.

That matters here. Environment and Climate Change Canada’s normals put the April mean at 7.8°C in Toronto and 4.5°C at Calgary’s airport. So an early-season round can cost you a few yards on every club compared with your indoor numbers. Take one more club on cold mornings, and redo the chart once the season has warmed up.

Altitude works the other way. Calgary sits at about 1,045 metres, and a ball flies farther in thinner air, so a chart built in Alberta will not match a spring golf trip to sea level on the coast. The fix is the same: measure where you play.

Step three: read the list for two faults

Once the numbers are on paper, look for two things.

Holes. Aim for gaps of roughly ten to fifteen yards between neighbouring short clubs, and up to about twenty at the long end, where you are not attacking flags anyway. Any gap much wider than fifteen yards in the scoring clubs will leave you with awkward in-between shots.

Twins. Two clubs that carry within a few yards of each other mean one of them is only taking up space. The most common pair is at the top of the bag.

The usual suspect under the pitching wedge

Iron lofts have got stronger over the years, and the pitching wedge in many current game-improvement sets is somewhere around 43 to 45 degrees. The sand wedge in most bags is still 56. That leaves a gap of eleven or twelve degrees between two clubs next to each other, often worth thirty yards or more with nothing to fill it.

That gap falls exactly where many approach shots land, which is why an 80-yard shot can feel so awkward: a hard-swung sand wedge or a softened pitching wedge, and neither is a shot you practise. A gap wedge around 50 or 52 degrees fills it, and it costs much less than a driver.

Check lofts, not the letters on the sole. Wedges usually have the loft stamped on the head, and iron sets list lofts in their specifications. Spacing wedges four to six degrees apart is the target. Bounce matters too: soft, wet spring turf tends to reward more bounce, while firm, tight late-summer lies can suit less. If you are unsure, a pro can read it from your divots.

The top of the bag: fewer woods you cannot launch

Many amateurs carry a 3-wood that only really works off a tee, plus a 5-wood they barely use. Off the turf, the two often carry about the same distance because neither gets properly airborne.

Ask yourself one question about every club above your irons: would you hit it off the fairway, with confidence, on a hole that matters? If the answer is no, it is a tee club, and one tee club besides the driver is enough. For most players, a 5-wood or a 7-wood does more work than a 3-wood, because the extra loft needs less clubhead speed.

The same logic covers long irons. A 4-iron needs speed to launch; a hybrid with the same loft launches higher, lands more softly and gets out of thick rough more easily thanks to its wider sole. For many mid-handicappers, two hybrids in place of the 4 and 5-irons is the most reliable swap. Driving irons and modern easy-launch long irons sit between the two, so compare all three at the same loft.

Then take clubs out, and count before you tee off

Each club you add means one comes out: often the 3-iron, the second fairway wood, or a lob wedge you trust about once in five swings. Twelve clubs with even gaps beat fourteen with a hole in the middle, and plenty of good players carry fewer than the limit.

Count before every competition. If you start with more than fourteen clubs, stroke play carries a two-stroke penalty for each hole where the breach happened, up to four strokes in total. In match play, the match score is reduced by one hole for each such hole, up to two holes. As soon as you notice, you must take the extra club out of play before your next stroke, for example by telling your marker or turning it upside down in the bag. A demo club left in the bag after a session is a classic way this happens.

Where to check your gaps in Canada

One large Canadian golf retailer offers custom fitting by appointment at every location, and says every store has a Foresight GCQuad launch monitor. Its premium custom fitting is a paid service run by a master club fitter, priced by club, and the fee is waived with a club purchase over $549.99. If your list shows a single gap to fill, bring the list and ask for a fitting of that one club rather than the whole bag.

A PGA of Canada professional, found through the association’s Find a Pro search, can help you read the numbers and decide which club to change first. In Toronto, FORE! also offers coaching with PGA of Canada professionals in its simulator bays.

If you would rather do it for free, build the list over a season from your rounds with a GPS app or shot tracker, which gives you distances from real lies rather than a mat. Our guide to launch monitors explains which numbers to trust, and a structured range session turns a bucket into data.

Panxis Golf has no commercial relationship with any of these retailers, facilities or professionals and earns no commission.

Your off-season checklist

• Book a bay or buy two buckets, and write down the carry for every club over ten swings.
• Circle any gap wider than fifteen yards and any two clubs within a few yards of each other.
• Read the loft on your pitching wedge before buying another wedge.
• Fill the biggest gap, take out the club it replaces, and add a club for cold April mornings.
• Count to fourteen, or fewer, on the first tee of every competition.

The best new club for most golfers costs less than a new driver: it fills a gap your numbers already show, and it replaces something you never hit.

How this page was put together

The custom fitting terms and the $549.99 fee-waiver threshold come from Golf Town (Canada). Panxis Golf has no commercial relationship with this retailer.