Cam Smith shortens driver length at the U.S. Open. Here’s why it helped

Immediately following the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club, that year’s champion, Bryson DeChambeau, declared he’d be testing 48-inch drivers to continue his quest for more distance. At the time, it seemed longer drivers were the future of equipment, and it sent shockwaves through the golf world. Fellow competitors began testing longer driver shafts to find more speed, and the USGA since added a local rule option that limits driver length to 46 inches.

Nearly two years after DeChambeau’s announcement, the driver length craze has mostly fizzled out. In fact, some players have even gone the other direction, finding shorter driver lengths to be more beneficial to overall performance.

Case in point, PLAYERS champion Cameron Smith has shortened his driver by a half-inch for this week’s U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Smith already has two PGA TOUR wins under his belt this year and ranks fifth in the FedExCup but in his last few starts, he admits his driver performance has hit the skids.

“I think the last couple of weeks the driver has got me a little bit in trouble,” Smith said in a press conference at the U.S. Open. “Haven't hit as many fairways as I would like, and the rough the last couple of weeks has been pretty brutal, as well. So lots of chopping out and practicing my wedges for this week, so hopefully I can hit some more fairways and make some more birdies.”

That in mind, ahead of this week, Smith worked with his club fitter and Titleist tour rep J.J. Van Wezenbeeck to conduct driver testing in hopes of tightening up his driver game.

In the last few years, Smith has been using a 45-inch driver build. Most recently, he’s opted for a 10-degree Titleist TSi3 driver equipped with a Fujikura Ventus TR Blue 6X shaft.

Looking back to previous years, prior to using a 45-inch driver, Smith used to play with a driver that measured 44.5 inches. When current issues with his 45-inch driver came to the forefront – he was struggling with his dispersion and center contact – Smith told Van Wezenbeeck he wanted to try a 44.5-inch driver again.

For Van Wezenbeeck, cutting a half-inch off of a driver shaft means that weight has to be added back into the head in order to not throw off the swing weight of the club. After being properly weighted in the Titleist Tour Truck, the duo took to the practice range at the U.S. Open to conduct testing.

With his previous 45-inch TSi3 driver setup, Smith was struggling to find control over his ball flight, and he was missing the center of the face too often.

The 44.5-inch driver setup seems to have fixed those issues.

“We looked at strike pattern locations (with the shorter driver), and we found it tightened it up a little bit,” Van Wezenbeeck told GolfWRX. “He’s back to working it both directions off the tee, so centering the strike was helping.”

All things being equal, a shorter driver will tend to reduce swing speed, which could lead to a distance loss. The goal when making driver changes is rarely to hit the ball shorter, but Smith was actually finding that he wasn’t losing ball speed despite the shorter build.

“It can potentially lower swing speed because of the shorter shaft, but what we find with players is if you can control the strike location and it’s more centered, the athlete has more freedom,” Van Wezenbeeck explained. “So we weren’t seeing any ball speed losses. That was the thing, even though we were shorter, we didn’t see a ball speed loss.”

In the end, Smith found the new 44.5-inch TSi3 driver setup to provide more consistent strikes, more control over trajectory, and no loss in distance.

For amateur golfers, there’s an important lesson here. The goal when looking for the right driver setup is to improve consistency of center contact; most times, that’s more important than using a driver that you can simply swing harder.