What Goes on a Stance File, and Why It Outlives the Clubs

A build sheet has a short useful life. It describes a set of clubs, and the moment you sell those clubs, or bend them, or the manufacturer discontinues the head, most of what is written on it becomes historical rather than practical.

The stance file is the other half of the paperwork and it ages far better. It describes the golfer rather than the equipment, and while golfers do change, they change slowly and in ways that are worth being able to see.

What Is Actually on It

One side of paper, plus two photographs. Deliberately short, because a document nobody can read at a glance is a document nobody uses.

The address measurements. Ball position in inches behind the lead heel line, per club category. Stance width at the ankles. Handle height and shaft lean at address. Body line against face line in degrees. Tee height for anything played off a peg. Grip pressure as the golfer reported it on a five point scale, which is subjective and still useful because it is the golfer's own scale.

Two frames. Down the line and face on, captured at the settled address position we agreed to work from. Both carry the reference scale that was taped to the mat, so they can be measured later rather than merely looked at.

The static measurements. Height, wrist to floor, glove size, hand span. These barely move in an adult and they anchor everything else.

The session conditions. Date, which fitter, which surfaces, and for outdoor work the temperature, pressure and humidity stamp. Without that stamp a carry figure from one visit cannot be honestly compared with one from another.

The reference block. What you hit at the start of the session with your own clubs, summarised as median, spread and discard count. This is the single most reused row in the entire file.

Why the Reference Block Is the Valuable Part

Every fitting produces a recommendation, and a recommendation is only meaningful relative to a baseline. Three years later, the question a golfer actually wants answered is not "what did you recommend" but "am I better off than I was, and by how much".

That question is unanswerable without a preserved baseline taken under recorded conditions. With one, it is straightforward: hit a fresh reference block on the return visit, with the address marks rebuilt from the file, and compare like with like.

We can then separate three things that otherwise get tangled together. What the equipment did. What the golfer's swing did over three years. And what the weather was doing on each of the two days. Studios that keep only a build sheet cannot separate any of them and generally end up attributing everything to the equipment, because equipment is what they sell.

Without a baseline under recorded conditions, every claim about improvement is a story. With one, it is a subtraction.

What a Return Visit Looks Like

The block opens by pulling your file. Tape goes down on the mat at your recorded ball position and stance width before you have hit anything, and the two old frames sit on the screen beside the live camera feed.

The first thing we do is check whether your current address still matches the file. Sometimes it does almost exactly, which is a finding. Frequently it does not, and the gap tells us something before a single ball is struck: a golfer who has taken lessons, or lost mobility, or simply drifted over two seasons will show it here plainly.

Then the reference block, then the comparison against the stored one. That whole opening runs about fifteen minutes faster than a first visit, which is why a return session costs less and why we say so on the rates page.

The Uncomfortable Findings

Files are honest in both directions. We have pulled a file and found that a golfer's carry numbers had dropped four yards across four years with an address position that barely moved, which is an age and mobility conversation rather than an equipment one. We have also pulled files showing that a previous recommendation of ours did not hold up.

That second case is the reason to keep them. A studio that never reviews its own past recommendations against later data is not learning anything, and the file is the only mechanism that makes the review possible. Two of the discard rules we now use came out of exactly that exercise.

Who Owns It

You do. A copy leaves with you on the day, printed, and you are welcome to take it to any other fitter in the country. It is written to be legible to somebody else: measurements are in stated units against a named reference, the conditions are stamped, and nothing is recorded in a private shorthand.

Our copy stays in the studio indefinitely and costs nothing to retrieve, including for people who never bought anything from us. If you want it deleted, ask and it is deleted. It contains measurements of a person, and that seems like the obvious default to us.

Building Your Own Version

You do not need a studio for a rough version of this. Photograph your address position down the line once a season, from the same spot, with a stick on the ground. Write down the club, the date and the conditions. Keep them in one folder.

In three years that folder will tell you more about your golf than any launch monitor session, because it is the only record you will have of the thing that changed most and got measured least.