Golf Achievement Academy

How far do you actually hit it?

Most golfers pick a club from the longest shot they ever hit with it. That is why approach shots come up short. Answer three questions and you leave with a carry yardage for every club, the gaps between them, and the two clubs in your bag doing the same job.

Which number do you already have?

Any one of these is enough. Pick the one you actually know rather than the one you wish you knew.

Your bag, by carry distance

Carry, not total. Carry is the number that decides whether the ball clears the bunker. Roll is a course condition, not a club distance.

Clubs in your bag. Tap to add or remove. Woods and hybrids are written 3w, 4h, and so on.

Where you sit

Driver clubhead speed by skill level, from Trackman's published Combine averages. Your row is highlighted.

Measure your wedges first

Your gap, sand and lob wedge numbers on this chart are worked out from loft, because no large dataset publishes full swing wedge carry for amateur golfers. They are the least reliable numbers on the page, and they are also the easiest ones in golf to replace with a real measurement.

Do this Twenty minutes, one session. Take your wedges to a range with marked targets or a launch monitor. Hit ten balls with each at a full swing. Throw out the best one and the worst one. Average the middle eight and write it down. That is your number, and it beats every published table because it is yours. Then do the same at a three quarter swing and you have a wedge grid instead of a wedge guess.

Also worth knowing Wedge lofts are not standard. A modern pitching wedge can be 43 degrees or 48 depending on the set, and that is a full club of difference. Check the loft stamped on your own wedges before you trust any chart, this one included.

Take the chart with you

A printable one page card for your bag, plus a spreadsheet you can adjust as your real numbers come in. Tell us where to send it and both unlock.

First name

One email with your chart. No list swapping, and you can leave whenever you want.

What to do with this

Step 1 Test the chart before you trust it. Take it to the range and hit five balls with three clubs off it. If your real carry sits inside five yards of the chart, the chart is close enough to play off. If it is out by more than ten, your input number was optimistic. Enter a lower one and run it again.

Step 2 Play the carry number, not the best one. The yardage you play is the one you can repeat, not the one you hit once downwind in July.

Step 3 Fix the gaps before you buy anything. A hole in the bag is a loft problem or a shaft problem, and both are cheaper to diagnose than to guess at.

Where these numbers come from, and what they cannot tell you

This chart is an estimate built from published launch monitor and shot tracking data. It is a starting point for measurement, not a substitute for it. Two golfers at the same clubhead speed can carry a driver twenty yards apart, because launch angle, spin and strike quality decide as much as speed does.

The speed to distance model

Clubhead speed converts to driver carry on a curve that rises from about 1.95 yards per mph at 70 mph to about 2.40 at 120 mph, because faster players also launch and spin the ball better. The curve is anchored on Trackman's published tour carry figures and checked against Arccos on course driving distance. At 95 mph it predicts 207 yards of carry, which with normal roll lands on the 223 yard total Arccos records for 10 to 14.9 handicap men. At 92 mph it lands on their 15 to 19.9 handicap figure. It is built for amateur launch conditions, so a tour player entering their own speed will see a number below what they actually carry.

The rest of the bag

Each club is a proportion of driver carry. Those proportions are taken from Trackman's 2023 PGA and LPGA Tour averages and from Shot Scope's per club distances by handicap, and they shift with speed: slower golfers have iron distances bunched closer together, faster golfers have them spread further apart. The chart interpolates between the two shapes based on your driver carry.

The woods, hybrids and wedges

Only a handful of clubs have published carry figures: driver, 3 wood, 5 wood, a generic hybrid, the irons and the pitching wedge. Every other club on the list, the 4 through 11 woods, the 2 through 7 hybrids, and the gap, sand and lob wedges, is placed on the ladder by loft, stepping down from the nearest published club within its own family. That is a reasonable way to order a bag and a poor way to set a yardage, so treat those clubs as positions in the ladder rather than as numbers to play off until you have measured them.

What is not published anywhere

Full swing wedge carry for amateur golfers. The one widely circulated wedge chart mixes in chips and pitches, so it is not a full swing number.
Per club carry distance for amateurs from any launch monitor dataset. Trackman publishes amateur driver figures only.
Any per club distance by swing speed table from an equipment manufacturer. Every chart of that kind on the internet, including this one, is a model.

Sources

Trackman, Tour Averages 2023, and Combine averages by skill level for driver clubhead speed, ball speed and smash factor.
Arccos Driving Distance Report, 2026 edition. Five million rounds, roughly ten million driver tee shots, total distance rather than carry.
Shot Scope Annual Golf Performance Report, per club distance by handicap, reported as a performance average with outliers removed.

Where those sources disagree, the wider range is the honest answer, and the only way to close it is to measure your own.

How far do you actually hit it?

Which number do you already have?

Enter your number

What do you typically shoot for 18 holes?

Your bag, by carry distance

Where you sit

Measure your wedges first

Take the chart with you

Your chart is ready

What to do with this

The speed to distance model

The rest of the bag

The woods, hybrids and wedges

What is not published anywhere

Sources