Tour Striker Driver – Review

(Written By: GolfSpy Matt) To say that the Original Tour Striker was popular here at MGS would be a hellova an understatement: it was my “2011 Training Aid of the Year”, and countless MGS readers have written testimonials on this site stating how it’s helped their ball striking. But, now Martin Chuck has introduced the Tour Striker Driver.  And ever since we got a glimpse of this newest training aid prototype at the 2012 PGA Show it has continued to be one of the most highly anticipated products we had planned for review by the readers.  So, question is, will this training aid create a legion of loyal users the way the original Tour Striker did?

Read on to find out what Golfspy Tim and I think.

Ease of Use/Set Up

Just like the Tour Striker iron, the Tour Striker Driver is 100% easy to use because it’s simply a golf club: tee up a ball and swing at it.

Score: 10/10

Effectiveness

Golfspy Tim and I had diverging opinions about the effectiveness of the Tour Striker Driver.  I’ll lead with Tim’s thoughts:

Tim felt that the Tour Striker Driver was an effective way of getting him to slow down and focus on his swing.  He said that he hit his share of grounders with it, but, with practice, got to the point where he was hitting most of his shots on the center of the face. This improvement in technique carried over to his regular driver somewhat irregularly because he still had to think about slowing down and swinging more carefully.  Overall, Tim believes that the Tour Striker Driver, used regularly, could help a player to ingrain the idea of swinging in rhythm and hitting the center of the face regularly, but the player has to be prepared for a “light spanking” from the club.

My experience with the Tour Striker Driver was not as positive. My primary mishit with the driver is on the heel, but all my shots tend to be higher on the face.  If you look at the pictures, you’ll see that the Tour Striker Driver is actually pretty forgiving as long as the ball is hit on the top half of the face.  As a result, I didn’t get much feedback from the club, so I didn’t see a big change in my strike pattern. I saw similar things when the Peanut Gallery tested it (full details below).

Beyond my personal experience, I don’t feel like the Tour Striker Driver teaches a particular mechanic.  Here’s what I mean by that: the original Tour Striker forced you to do two specific things – hit down and get your hands in front of the ball at impact.  If you didn’t do those things, you hit a grounder and felt like a dummy.  The Tour Striker Driver forces you to hit the center of the face…but how?  Tim found that he could do it if he slowed down, but I don’t want to slow down, I want to hit the ball FAR.  I know I have a mechanical problem (extending my arms into impact), but the Tour Striker Driver did not give me clear feedback on how to fix this.

So there you go: two very different ideas about the “Effectiveness” of the Tour Striker Driver.  Put them together and you get an average grade for Effectiveness.

Score: 22/30

Longevity

Since “Longevity” is largely based on Effectiveness (why would you keep using something that wasn’t effective?) Tim and I also had different opinions about the Tour Striker Driver’s longevity.  For me, it was pretty quickly relegated to one of the bags in my office.  Tim felt that continued use of the Tour Striker Driver would help to ingrain the idea of slowing down and swinging in tempo.  Again, a split decision yields an average score.

Score: 15/20

Value

The Tour Striker Driver retails through the Tour Striker website for $300.  This price tag puts the Tour Striker Driver at the high end of the price scale since we assume that an average training aid is about $100.  With that price, it would need to be unbelievably effective with great longevity to get a good “Value Score”.  Since we ended up finding that the Tour Striker is average in both the aforementioned categories, its high price leads it to a poor “Value Score”.

Score: 10/20

The Peanut Gallery

I passed the Tour Striker Driver around among the usual Peanut Gallery testers and the response from each one was virtually identical.  It started with, “Whoa, this must be impossible to hit.”  That sentiment continued as they stood over the first shot, often saying, “Ok, not sure what’s going to happen here…”  Then, after a reasonably good hit, they looked a little puzzled before proceeding to hit a few more good ones.  Usually there was a mishit somewhere in the mix, but never more than one or two.

Now, admittedly, the Peanut Gallery is made up of better-than-average players, but I was still surprised that so many of them hit the Tour Striker Driver as well as they did.  After a short session with it, most of them gave it a shrug and said they didn’t really see themselves using it regularly.  That opinion was definitely not changed by the $300 price tag.

Score: 13/20

Final Thoughts

After my own experience with the Tour Striker Driver and discussing it with Tim and others, it seems like the TSD is a love-it-or-hate-it type of training aid.  I expect that some of you may try this and think I’m an idiot for not giving it an A+.  Others of you might think Tim should resign in shame for thinking this is a good training aid.  What we can both agree on is that $300 is a big price tag for a training aid you might not find effective.   Speaking only for myself now, I think you might be better off with a few rolls of impact tape and a couple lessons with a qualified instructor.

Score: 70/100

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