Equipment Review:
Wilson Staff FYbrid Fitting System
by Jeffrey Reed, Editor, LondonOntarioGolf.com

By now, it’s safe to say you have at least one hybrid club in your bag – but which one? That’s where the confusion starts for most golfers, but it shouldn’t. For starters, you most likely should be including a 2- and 3-iron replacement amongst your hybrid clubs. But although that is a general rule, all golfers aren’t created equal.

Wilson Staff, with an innovative club fitting system, now takes the guess work out of custom club selection. The FYbrid Fitting System fuses fairway woods and hybrids into one easy-to-understand family of fairway utilities. The result? Simpler club selection, and easier-to-hit options for long distance needs.

“Very few things are more important than having confidence in your equipment and knowing that it’s going to deliver the required yardage,” says Wilson Staff’s most prominent ambassador, Ireland’s Padraig Harrington, winner of the 2007 Open Championship. “The new Wilson Staff FYbrids offer any golfer the options that simplify the game from the driver down to the traditional 6-iron. The more you can simplify and remove doubt from your mind, the better you are going to play.”

Wilson wants you to spell simplify, “SimpliFY” – “FY” for FYbrid. Don’t be confused over the new terminology. There’s no need to be, since the FYbrid Fitting System makes club selection a cinch – and it is guaranteed to make the game simpler for you.

Using my game as an example, I’m a low single-digit handicap golfer who typically uses a 2-iron replacement – usually a 19-degree hybrid club. The Wilson Golf web site, www.wilsonstaff.com, provides an interactive questionnaire which charts your FYbrid selections for you.

In my case, I selected fast swing speed, 3-iron as the longest club I hit with consistency, and low to medium ball trajectory. The FYbrid chart chose two FYbrid clubs for me: the FY; and the 5w. Here’s how the fitting system breaks down.

There are six clubs in the FYbrid family: 3-, 4- and 5-hybrids (3h, 4h and 5h); 3- and 5-wood clubs (3w and 5w); and a club that bridges the gap – the 19.5-degree FY club.

The FY club is the key to the Wilson Staff FYbrid family. Consumer testing conducted by Wilson shows that the 19.5-degree loft and 41-in. shaft length is the optimum combination for most swing speeds from a fairway lie. But until now, no fairway wood or hybrid club had offered such a lethal combination. Because of traditional club overlap, the FY club actually replaces three clubs: the 2-iron, 2-hybrid and 7-wood. Its specialized head shape – a fairway wood-rescue club hybrid – plus its loft/length combo offers the greatest shot flexibility of any club on the market. The FY club is the perfect club, for example, for long par-3s.

Using a slow, easy swing, the FY club is easy to master, whether you’re sweeping or hitting down on the ball. I prefer to hit down when using the FY, but because the shaft is an inch longer than a hybrid club, it can be mastered sweeping, too. Therein lies the beauty of the FY: it’s a versatile performer.

Now that you know all about the FY club, the rest is a cinch. There are two fairway woods – 3-wood (15 degrees), and 5-wood (18 degrees); plus three iron replacements – 3-hybrid (21 degrees), 4-hybrid (24-degrees) and 5-hybrid (27 degrees), replacing the 3-, 4- and 5-iron.

Here’s another reason why these clubs are long, straight and easy to use from a myriad of lies. Each club in the FYbrid Fitting System features a proprietary sole design with heel, toe and central reliefs. The railed sole plate minimizes club bounce into the ball at impact – the leading cause of thin shots. The toe and heel reliefs also make the clubs more playable from hillside lies and allow the club to be laid open or closed for more advanced shot making.

I really like the weight of these clubs. Often, hybrid clubs and fairway metals feel too light and thus require lead tape. Not the FYbrid family. The design of these clubs make them feel custom fit, right off the rack.

The Wilson Staff FYbrid family of clubs feature the Tour-winning UST Proforce V2 graphite shafts. Available in RH and LH models, each club sells for approximately $150.

Two clubs I tested – the 3H and 3w – are some of the longest and most accurate clubs in their categories. As for the FY club, it’s in a league of its own.

For more info on all of Wilson’s FYbrid family, visit www.wilsonstaff.com.