There is no sign out the front claiming to be the world’s greatest short-game laboratory, even though it is. In fact, the Titleist Performance Institute in Oceanside, California, simply blends in with the office complexes within the area. From the outside, “TPI” resembles a business park boasting a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean.
In field of research and discoveries, this corner of the world is more famous as the home of the University of San Diego, only 50 kilometres down the coast. The La Jolla campus of USD has a reputation as the global centre for ocean, earth and atmospheric science research, yet the short-game innovations made at TPI are almost as impressive.
It was early April when Australian Golf Digest visited Oceanside. The sights and sounds of the northern spring were in the air and TPI’s wedge facilities had been put through their paces, given some of the world’s best golfers – who play Titleist wedges and balls – had travelled to Southern California to fine-tune their setups for the demanding shots they’d soon face at Augusta National.
A major reason for our trip to Oceanside was to spend time with renowned Vokey wedge guru on the PGA Tour, Aaron Dill.
If you’ve ever been to a PGA Tour event, or a major, and wandered over to the short-game area or the practice range, there’s a chance you saw Dill walking briskly, dressed head to toe in FootJoy gear, with his trademark, upbeat demeanour. He would have been handing a tour pro a wedge (or wedges), confident he had solved the Rubik’s Cube they’d tasked him with. This grind, that bounce, 1 degree upright, with this finish and that grip.
Dill is quick to laugh, is endlessly enthusiastic and speaks with the excitement of someone who still can’t quite believe this became his job 21 years ago.
For Australian golfers, his influence is impossible to ignore. Cameron Smith has trusted him for years. Cameron Davis leans on his expertise. Adam Scott has spent countless hours testing wedges alongside him. Around the professional game, if a player is searching for a fraction more spin, a slightly different launch window or a grind that better suits tight turf for the Open Championship or damper surfaces elsewhere, chances are Dill has already thought about it.
Dill’s job title at Titleist is director of Vokey player relations. Unofficially, he’s the professional game’s wedge whisperer. Walking through the short-game area at TPI, it’s immediately obvious why Bob Vokey chose him as the man to carry out his life’s work on tour. Dill loves golf, loves wedges and the feedback he gets on the Vokey wedge innovation from tour pros.
“I’m a little biased,” Dill says with a grin. “As golf nerds, we love the tour. The tour is fascinating, right? To be able to go out every single week and communicate with the best players in the world and bring that feedback home to create something new and interesting down the road is really fun.”
Most Monday mornings on the PGA Tour, before most players have even unpacked their travel bags, Dill is already studying that week’s host course. By Tuesday he’s observing short-game sessions around practice greens. By Wednesday he’s grinding soles by hand inside the Titleist equipment truck before delivering freshly built wedges to players preparing to compete in the first round.
The constant conversations between players and Dill eventually arrive back in Oceanside, where future Vokey wedges begin their research, development and production cycles. The recently released SM11 is perhaps the best example yet.
While most golfers assume new equipment is designed inside laboratories, Dill explains that the real laboratory is the PGA Tour itself.
“We always come to the table with a lot of ideas, and I’d say 90 percent of them are no good,” Dill says. “They’re not obtainable or they’re not really focused on what the tour is asking us to pay attention to. But the 10 percent of things that we do bring to the table are powerful. It’s the tour telling us we need you to focus on spin, trajectory, shapes, feels, materials, whatever it may be.”
Dill’s mantra with wedges is to fit golfers for a system where every wedge has a defined purpose from 120 metres in. He uses the strike location on the clubface as his compass; it determines almost every fitting decision, including loft, grind and bounce. His mission is to help golfers strike as close to the centre of the face as possible, as frequently as possible. Ideally, between grooves two and five. Striking this area is how a golfer develops repeatable launch, spin and distance control. Dill likes to establish accurate carry distances at 85 percent swing speed and go from there.
This approach is how Dill helps Vokey wedges develop their breakthroughs. Sometimes, those innovations come from the biggest names in golf, but more often they come from one very specific request. Dill points to this year’s Players Championship winner Cameron Young as one player whose feedback acutely shaped SM11.
“Spin helps us have control [but] you’ve got to find that perfect balance of, Where do I need spin? Where do I need to manage that spin?”
Dill recalls Young challenging the Vokey team to reduce spin in his stronger-lofted wedges while simultaneously helping him launch higher, softer shots with his lob wedge from difficult bunker lies. The solution eventually became part of the SM11 story.
“I remember we did that at Valhalla during the [2024] PGA Championship,” Dill says. “He was having a hard time getting it up and down from the greenside bunkers there. I saw him a week later and I said, ‘How’s that wedge?’ He goes, ‘I was 10 for 10 in bunker saves.’ So, I’d say it was pretty good.”
Young wasn’t alone; Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, as well as Australians like Smith and Davis, all want marginally different ball flights.
“These elite golfers are outstanding wedge players already, but they’re still looking for that advantage,” Dill says. “How do I shave a shot here and there? How do I control my Pro V1 a little bit more?”
Dill’s role is to build and maintain trust on tour in Vokey wedges. That isn’t built overnight, rather earned through Dill being on tour, and Vokey and his wedge specialists innovating at Oceanside. It has taken decades of conversations, testing sessions and refinements that most golfers will never see, unless they visit the legendary facility.
Ironically, tour pros often long for the opposite of innovation.
“Tour players are funny,” Dill laughs. “We always design product and we expect tour players to say, ‘This has got to be way better than a prior generation.’ And when you sit down with them and you really talk about what they’re wanting, they’ll tell you, ‘Hey, I don’t want you to change really anything.’”
Yet change is a constant in Dill’s world. Not in the clubs themselves, but in the golf courses pros face week to week, many of which they return to a year later under different conditions.
“When we start our season, which is on the west coast, we’re dealing with very different conditions than we would in Florida,” Dill says. “And then we make our way to Texas and through the Midwest. These different regions around the United States offer different grass, they offer different soil structures, they have different rain patterns. Knowing you have 27 different options in the line-up that hopefully can fulfil those needs is a really important part of what we’re trying to pay attention to.
“I’ll look at the weather patterns. I’ll look at how much rain have they taken on. How hot is it? Is this a humid environment? Going from places like TPC Scottsdale [for the WM Phoenix Open], which is firm and cut really tight. Then you go to some places like Muirfield Village [for the Memorial Tournament] and you go, ‘Oh my gosh, this turf is so soft. It’s so spongy.’ Then going to a place like St Andrews [for The Open, it’s] vastly different conditions. Even though they’re firm and tight, St Andrews’ [fairways are] a lot harder ground.
“You begin to realise that it’s so important to have all these different things because we’ve got to have a solution to every different situation.”
It’s a philosophy Australian golfers instinctively understand. Growing up on firm Melbourne Sandbelt courses, or kikuyu or couch fairways, or grainy Queensland Bermuda teaches imagination. Players learn to flight wedges, manufacture spin and use the ground rather than simply throwing the ball into the air.
Where the wedges began
For someone whose work influences major championships, Dill’s own journey began remarkably simply: with his father. But there was another passion competing for his attention: cooking.
“It was either culinary school or it was golf,” Dill recalls. “I love the kitchen. I worked in kitchens. I love the experience and the heat of the kitchen, but golf I think was my calling.”
The parallels aren’t difficult to see; chefs and equipment gurus obsess over what is going into the product and how to hone their technique.
Dill joined Titleist in 2005 before fate intervened through one phone call from Vokey. “Bob calls me up one day… and he goes, ‘Hey, you want to come work with me on tour?’ I was like, ‘What? Yeah! Yeah, I want to work for you on tour.’”
Learning directly under perhaps the greatest wedge designer in history brought equal parts excitement and pressure. “The first couple of years were tough because you’re learning this new trade,” Dill recalls. “It’s dedicated to one thing. It’s short-game play. And I was learning from the master, which is a lot of pressure. I told myself that this experience comes once in a lifetime. I dedicated everything I had to making sure that I didn’t let him down.”
Dill never speaks about wedges as products, rather the possibilities.
“I love the customisation part of it,” he says. “Take a player, take them around a short-game area like this, watch them hit shots, ask them questions, and then give them something new and different that makes them more comfortable.
“The wedge-play part of it is such a fun thing to do, but it’s the most creative portion of the bag. Once you do, it’s pretty amazing how freeing that is for your short game and essentially how you score at the end of a round.”
Photographs by getty images/Darren Carroll
