Golfers spent the last day arguing about sticky notes. MyGolfSpy's guide to building a wedge distance matrix — nine to twelve carry numbers, three swing lengths per wedge, twenty minutes on a launch monitor — resurfaced this week and drew a fresh round of comments within hours. One reader has carried a laminated distance chart on his bag since the 1990s. Another keeps a printed table in his tee bag, updated every time he changes wedges. A third checked his range balls on a Trackman and found his pitching wedge flying 125 yards at the range and 110 on the course.
The method itself is older than most of the wedges it measures. Dave Pelz was teaching swing-length charts decades ago, and several commenters were quick to say so. What has changed is the measurement. Pelz's students paced off carries in a field. The same chart now takes one session in a sim bay, and the numbers are carry distances read off a screen, not guesses corrected by pride.
The structure is simple enough to explain in a sentence. Three swing lengths — waist-high, three-quarter, a controlled full — for each wedge in the bag. Three shots per swing length, average the carries, write down the number. Throw out the chunks and skulls. Do not round up. Then lay the numbers out from lowest to highest and read them for two things: gaps and overlaps. A cluster at 55 to 60 yards with nothing until 85 is a dead zone you will face four times a round. Two swings producing the same carry is either a tempo problem or a loft-gap problem, and the chart cannot tell you which — but it tells you the question exists, which is more than most golfers know about their own scoring zone.
The piece frames this as a foundation for feel, and that framing holds up. A tour player who says he felt a 72-yard shot is drawing on hundreds of verified repetitions. His feel has a reference point. Most amateur feel does not. It is guesswork wearing feel's clothing, and it is most expensive precisely where the chart applies — inside 100 yards, where a full-swing player has no rehearsed answer for half the distances on the card.
Two details from the comment section deserve more attention than the article gives them. The first is measurement conditions. The reader who ran range balls through a Trackman found wedge spin running 2,000 to 3,000 rpm low, which launched the ball lower and carried it farther — a 15-yard lie built into every number. A matrix built on the wrong ball is a confident chart of the wrong distances. The second is storage. The article's suggested homes for this hard-won data: a sticky note on the shaft, a piece of paper, a note on the phone. And its closing advice concedes the deeper problem — redo the chart once or twice a year, or whenever your swing changes. The chart is a snapshot. The swing is a moving picture. Every golfer who has found a two-year-old yardage card in a bag pocket knows how those two facts get along.
That is the real gap in the 20-minute fix. The work is not hard and the payoff is real — one commenter credited his printed matrix, built from launch monitor data, with a measurable improvement in approach play and a falling handicap. But the chart golfers build in June is quietly wrong by September, and the sticky note does not know it.