An old adage in golf equipment is that the shaft is “the engine of the golf club,” and that is one old sage piece of advice that will never be obsolete. Regardless of your strength profile or what club is in your hands or what kind of shafts you choose, the shaft is the most dynamic element of the golf club during the brief few milliseconds of the downswing.

The frustrating thing to me is that there is a ton more dialog about driver shafts than there is about iron shafts, and the shafts in your wedges and putter hardly get any attention at all. Since my early days in the industry (over 40 years ago now) I was schooled by some super bright “oldsters” about shaft performance.  And as I’ve grown to be super-focused on the wedge category for over thirty years now, I continue to see proof after proof that simply getting the right shafts in your wedges can dramatically improve your scoring range performance.

One of the things I see way too often is a golfer’s bag with graphite shafts in his or her irons, in weights from 50 to 60 grams, all the way up to the heavier graphite shafts in the 90 to 100-gram range, and then they are gaming off-the-rack wedges with the heavy stiff steel shaft almost all stock wedges are fitted with. Guys and ladies, this is absolute madness.

More and more players are opting for graphite shafts in their irons to improve their distance and performance. Why in the world that same golfer would simply pick some wedges off the rack with shafts that are as much as 30 to 50 grams heavier is beyond me. There is simply no physical way you can put the same swing on your set-match “P-club” as on your off-the-rack gap wedge when those two clubs are that far apart in weight and balance.

And if I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “I just don’t think graphite is stable enough for wedges.” What utter nonsense! If a 60- to 75-gram graphite shaft is stable enough for tour players’ drivers at 120-plus miles-per-hour clubhead speed and the largest head in the bag, it is certainly stable enough for a wedge you’ll swing at 55 to 75 miles per hour. Anyone who thinks differently is simply wrong.

Though I’m now on the north side of 70 years old, I still have my skills (mostly) and can move the ball respectfully “out there.” I still play to a low single-digit handicap (with most rounds marred by the two or three occasional ‘brain dead’ efforts), and I’ll share that I have not had a steel-shafted club in my bag in over 25 years. Including my putter. To me, the simple fact is that carbon fiber technology (i.e. graphite) is so advanced and so high-performance, I see no reason to ever play a steel-shafted golf club.

In my hundreds, or thousands, of wedge fittings, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen performance change dramatically for a golfer when we put a shaft in his or her hands that is more closely matched to their graphite-shafted irons. And a very accomplished club professional I know, who is a master fitter for all brands, told me after watching our old SCOR wedge fitting process, “Terry, I’ve been doing this a long time, but I never thought shafts could make that much difference in wedges.”

At Edison Golf, we are mostly a KBS shop, but we build wedges on lots of different shafts, and I can tell you that graphite wedge shafts leave nothing “on the table” when compared to steel. In fact, in most cases, we can improve almost any golfer’s control and dispersion by getting them into the right graphite shaft.

And when it comes to soft, solid feel of impact, no steel shaft can compare to a quality graphite product, especially for the vast majority of players who are migrating to lighter and lighter steel shafts. To get steel shafts lighter, the walls have to be thinner, and that compromises the sensation of impact because there is less material to dampen vibration.

The last point I’ll leave you with is this.

To have a deft short game, you need to control that wedge precisely. And that takes hand and forearm strength. The simple fact is this: If you don’t have the “Popeye” forearms and hand strength of today’s tour professionals, you simply cannot make the same weight wedge do the things they can make theirs do. Lighten up your wedge shafts and give today’s many high-quality graphite offerings a try. My bet is you’ll be pleasantly surprised.