For about a year, Mike Perkins, the manager at Carolina Custom Golf in Winston-Salem, has possessed a tool which makes his business stronger and the golf games of his patrons better. A new nationally-distributed club-fitting system dubbed Accu-Fit is bringing smiles to the faces of its certified dealers across the country—like Perkins, who readily admits that the new fitting system has been a boon to his University Parkway store. "Before we got it we didn’t have the means to frequency match," Perkins says when explaining the difference that Accu-Fit has made for his club fitting business. "It’s been a big help."

At the heart of the Accu-Fit system is a belief that relying on industry standardization with relation to shaft flex, lie angle, or length, leads to lesser fittings since, for example, a stiff flex for Manufacturer "A" may be truly stiff while a stiff flex for Manufacturer "B" may actually be a senior flex. To eliminate the confusion inherent with "industry standards" Accu-Fit uses a patent-pending formula to determine what they call a golfer’s Swing Coefficient. Simply put, the Swing Coefficient allows the golfer to choose from dozens of flexes rather standard five choices.

To arrive at a Swing Coefficient, a certified Accu-Fit club fitter like Perkins engages the golfer in a two-part evaluation. Following the usual questioning and measuring that takes place during most club fittings, Perkins tests for the proper shaft flex needed by the customer. First he tests for clubhead speed and then he performs a loading test which measures how quickly the golfer changes directions from backswing to downswing.

For the clubhead speed test, a specially calibrated Accu-Fit driver is used to hit several balls. These shots produce clubhead speed readings which are then divided by the number of swings to arrive at an average clubhead speed.

Next is the shaft loading test. Here, another specialty club, called the Accu-Fit Load Recorder, is swung a number of times, again accumulating several independent readings. By dividing the load readings by the number of swings Perkins gets an average shaft load.

The rest is easy. With Swing Coefficients in hand, Perkins simply plots these two measurements on the Accu-Fit Swing Coefficient Chart and selects the proper shaft flex for the golfer. With Accu-Fit it doesn’t matter what a manufacturer labels its club because this system isn’t concerned with words such as "stiff" or "regular." By placing numerical values on the physical characteristics of each parameter such as shaft flex, Accu-Fit isn’t subject to changing terminology. The numeric characteristics can always be measured and will not change.

To measure the frequency of an existing club, during a retro fitting for example, Perkins loads the club into the Accu-Fit frequency analyzer and gives the clubhead a light tweak and then waits for the device to display a cycles per minute reading. Again, there is no guesswork involved.

Once the proper flex is determined, the specifications for the customer’s clubs can quickly be associated with any golf club on today’s market. Accu-Fit is unique to other club fitting systems because it provides the golfer with means to accurately fit to any manufacturer’s golf clubs. And because Accu-Fit utilizes numeric values rather than terminology to measure shaft flex, lie angle, length and grip size, these numbers can easily be applied to popular clubs such as Calloway, Taylor Made, Cleveland, or Mizuno.

Many club fitters attempt to fit golfers to a particular brand of golf clubs, but the Accu-Fit club fitter can fit a customer to the club of his or her choice. And like most club fitters, Perkins can’t understand why anyone who buys a set of clubs wouldn’t take the time to get them custom fitted. "It doesn’t cost any extra," Perkins says. "You buy the clubs and the fitting is free."

Perkins also offers what Carolina Custom Golf calls a Value Added Program whereby anyone who buys a set of clubs or even a single new club is entitled to free greens fees at more than 25 courses across the state. "Customers can get fitted here and go somewhere else for their clubs," says Perkins, "but given what we [Carolina Custom Golf & Accu-Fit] offer, I don’t know why they would do that."