Abstract

As a tournament player, I have seen many different competitors play many different golf ball brands and have different results. I did this experiment to test which brand is the actual best in distance and consistency. My hypothesis was that Taylormade would be the winner because it is one of the most expensive brands and most successful tour players play with it. In order to get my results I had to test five golf brands by hitting ten drives for each ball in a rotating order on hole 2 at American Classic Golf Course and had assistance to place flags with numbers indicating which golf ball was hit so I could  measure the carry distance for each shot afterwards. To make sure everything was fair, I used the same hole, same tee box, same driver, same tee height and I hit the balls in the same order (Titleist, Taylormade, Maxfli, Callaway, Bridgestone) to eliminate the errors due to fatigue and weather changes. After hitting all 50 balls, I measured the distance from each numbered flag to the tee box using a tour compliant range finder and calculated the average distance and standard deviation for each brand. Maxfli had the longest average distance at 233.4 yards, followed by Taylormade at 232.1, Callaway at 231, Bridgestone at 230, and Titleist at 224.9 yards. When measuring consistency, Callaway had the lowest standard deviation at 6.51 yards and Titleist had the highest standard deviation at 11.57 yards. The results were surprisingly different from my hypothesis. Maxfli, which is the least expensive brand, won in the average distance and placed third in consistency and Callaway turned out to be the most consistent, suggesting that price doesn’t matter when it comes to a golf ball, and it’s all about how it feels for the golfer.