A 150-centimetre-tall LPGA Tour pro might unwittingly spark a revolution in your golf bag.
When diminutive Callaway staff player Yuna Nishimura asked the company to innovate her long clubs, it led the R&D team at Callaway to adapt the successful process for Nishimura into something that would benefit golfers the world over.
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The Quantum Mini Spinner fairway wood, which launched in Australia last Friday, is the result of one tour pro’s curiosity and an equipment company’s ability to parlay a single request into a setup revolution.
Nishimura sought a higher launch with a softer landing, especially for approach shots into the longer par 4s on tour. As such, she kept using a dated Great Big Bertha (GGB) and couldn’t switch to Callaway’s newer Epic Series, Rogue or Paradym.
“Our Japanese players are always struggling with hybrids or long irons, controlling distance and spin,” Ishino Shotaro from Callaway’s Japan R&D team told Australian Golf Digest earlier this week.
“Development-wise, it started very smoothly. We gathered her swing-speed code. We input her swing code into the face technology. Firstly, we copied that GGB shape because it looks very sharp, compact and with a deeper face. That was the preference for her. And the new AI technology in the face will minimise the gap between the toe-side mis-hit and heel-side mis-hit.
“That was a request from Yuna. She wanted less gap distance and a more spinny ball. And her ‘game ball’ is a draw, so we wanted a draw that’s more spinny, with a soft landing. We incorporated that data into the face as well.
“This was the first time ever we put a staffer’s swing code into the product. She’s popular in Japan and people wanted to have her swing code into the face and they wanted to try it and see how it was going to work.”
Callaway’s answer to Nishimura’s question already sells well in Japan – it’s the No.1 fairway wood in the market – and the Quantum Mini Spinner is now available here, aiming to capture a market with similar wants and needs.
At 21 degrees, the Mini Spinner carries the same loft as Callaway’s standard Quantum 7-wood, but the shaft is nearly three-quarters of an inch shorter and the lie angle sits two-and-a-half degrees more upright. Shorter and more upright is designed to create more of an iron motion – a steeper angle of attack instead of the sweeping motion a longer, flatter fairway wood encourages.
That matters for consistency more than the numbers on a launch monitor. A shorter shaft is meant to be easier to control through impact.
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“When it comes to the short wood, the current product has a closer face angle and it’s better for an amateur women’s player, and also a beginner,” Shotaro adds. “But a tour player on the LPGA wants to have a square face angle [that] doesn’t have too much offset on it and a more workable face. Those pieces went into the GBB, so that is why we put that as a benchmark.”
Shotaro says the Mini Spinner best suits golfers with swing speeds in the 80 to 100-mile-per-hour range.
“Also players who don’t like long irons and who don’t have enough [speed to] stop balls using a hybrid.”
Adding more fairway woods to a golfer’s arsenal raises a broader question about how to configure a 14-club set. Shotaro says it’s still a question of swing speed – and comfort with using long irons. For golfers with slower actions and/or who don’t enjoy long-iron shots, the Mini Spinner should replace the longer irons and even some hybrids. Meanwhile, as golfers age and their swing naturally loses some speed, this new line offers an alternative.
As to what’s next in this space, Shotaro says momentum remains.
“We also want to go deeper into how we can make a shorter roll distance,” he says. “We developed a good product in this first Spinner, but we’re also seeing that in LPGA players that they want to have more spin and more stopping performance in this short wood. So we wanted to see how we can improve that area in the future.”
– Additional reporting by Jonathan Wall
