Ladder Notes · Gapping
Where a Set Doubles Up
A hole in your bag announces itself. A duplicate hides in plain sight for years, because the shot always feels like it went roughly the right distance — you just used the wrong club to do it.
Ask a golfer whether they have a gap in their bag and most will answer confidently. Somewhere around 190, usually, or between the pitching wedge and the sand wedge. They know because the distance keeps turning up and neither adjacent club fits it.
Ask the same golfer whether they have two clubs that go the same distance and you get a blank look. Yet in the sets I baseline, duplication is more common than holes by a comfortable margin. Roughly two thirds of the bags that come through here have at least one pair of clubs within five yards of each other.
Why It Goes Unnoticed
A gap produces a bad outcome you can feel. You are at 187, you hit the 180 club as hard as you can, it comes up short, and you remember it. Feedback is immediate and negative.
A duplicate produces nothing. You are at 175, you pull the club you always pull at 175, and it goes 175. The fact that the club above it would also have gone 175 never surfaces, because you never hit both from the same spot. The cost is invisible: a wasted slot in the bag, and a gap somewhere else that the wasted club could have covered.
Cause One: Loft Drift
The most common by a distance. Irons bend. Forged heads bend more readily than cast, but everything bends eventually — from mat practice, from getting thrown into a trunk, from a hundred small impacts across a season.
When one club in a set bends a degree strong and its neighbour bends a degree weak, the four degrees of loft the manufacturer put between them becomes two. Two degrees of loft in the mid irons is worth roughly four to six yards, which is well inside the noise of how the golfer perceives distance.
The set I measured last Thursday was a good example: a six iron reading 29 degrees against a seven reading 31.5. Nominally four degrees apart, actually two and a half. Carry difference measured on the monitor was four yards. Bending both back to spec took ten minutes and restored an eleven yard gap.
| Club | Spec loft | Measured | Error |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 iron | 25.0° | 25.5° | +0.5 |
| 6 iron | 28.0° | 29.0° | +1.0 |
| 7 iron | 32.0° | 31.5° | −0.5 |
| 8 iron | 36.0° | 36.0° | 0 |
| 9 iron | 40.0° | 41.0° | +1.0 |
The 6 and 7 were 2.5 degrees apart instead of 4. That pair was the duplicate.
Cause Two: Mixed Design Intent
The second common source is a set assembled from more than one design philosophy. A modern player-distance long iron with a strong loft and a hot face sitting directly above a traditional cavity seven iron is two different launch approaches bolted together.
Both clubs work perfectly well on their own. The transition between them does not, and it typically manifests as the longer club not actually going any further, because the loft was strengthened but the golfer's speed cannot extract the extra distance from it.
This is why a blended set has to be planned rather than accumulated. Where the transition happens, the lofts on either side need adjusting so the ladder runs smoothly across the join. It is entirely doable and it is almost never done by anybody who is not measuring.
Cause Three: The Top of the Bag
The third source is the stretch between the fairway wood and the longest iron, which for most golfers is filled one purchase at a time over several years with no plan whatsoever.
A three wood bought in 2018. A four hybrid bought after a bad round. A three iron kept for sentimental reasons. Nobody ever asked what carry each was supposed to deliver, and the numbers routinely come out within a few yards of each other because a golfer's speed sets a practical ceiling that all three clubs bump against.
The fix here is rarely a bend. It is deciding what each slot is for, measuring what each candidate actually carries, and removing whatever is redundant. Sessions on the top of the bag frequently end with the golfer carrying fewer clubs there and using the freed slots for a gap wedge.
How to Find Yours Without a Monitor
You need a launch monitor to do this properly, but there is a rough field test that will tell you whether it is worth investigating.
- Pick two adjacent clubs you suspect. Go to a range with real distance markers, not a mat bay.
- Hit ten shots with each, alternating, on the same day in the same conditions.
- Ignore your two longest and two shortest with each club. Look at the middle six.
- If the middle six of the two clubs overlap substantially, you have a duplicate.
It is crude and it will not give you a number to write down. What it will do is tell you whether to spend thirty-five dollars on a spec check, which will give you the answer definitively in twenty minutes.
What It Is Worth Fixing
Honestly, sometimes not much. If your duplicate is between two long clubs you rarely use, and there is no distance on your home course that goes uncovered, you can leave it alone and nothing bad will happen.
But usually it is worth fixing, because a duplicate is not just a redundant club — it is a redundant club and a gap somewhere else. Fourteen slots is a hard limit. Every one spent twice is one not spent covering a distance you actually face.
The cheapest version of the fix is a set of bends and a regrip, which comes to well under two hundred dollars for most sets and is the single highest-yield piece of equipment work available to an amateur golfer.