Nick Sherburne
Fitting the golf landscape with Club Champion
Nick Sherburne was a young teen when he started playing golf. His home course was a nine-holer in the town of Downers Grove, Illinois, best known as the site of the original Chicago Golf Club, which Charles Blair Macdonald, the father of golf in America, founded in 1892.
When Sherburne turned 16, he took a job at Cog Hill, a nearby 72-hole public golf facility that hosted the Western Open for 16 straight years.
“I worked the range and the bag drop,” said the now 42-year-old Sherburne. “I was also able to play for free on a couple of the courses.”
As a bonus, he also helped with the Western Open, and Sherburne remembers watching the tour vans for golf equipment makers driving onto the facility so they could tweak the clubs of the players who were competing.
“I asked our head professional, Jeff Rimsnider, about those vans and wondered why Cog Hill did not do the same sort of thing for our golfers,” he said. “Jeff told me that most of them either did not have the time or the money to spend on a club fitting or did not appreciate how much one might help their games.”
Soon after, Sherburne purchased his first set of new golf clubs. “They were Titleists, and I paid half with my own money and borrowed the rest from my grandmother, who made me pay her back with interest,” he said. “Then, Jeff fit me for them.”
Thus began a fascination with golf clubs and the fitting process that eventually led Sherburne in 2010 to co-found Club Champion. He was only 27 years old.
Based in Willowbrook, Illinois, the company was born from the idea that proper fittings are just as valuable to recreational golfers as they are for tour professionals and elite amateurs.
Sherburne also believed that the advent of launch monitors and new technologies in shafts, grips and clubheads represented an opportunity for a process that had become less about art and mostly about science and technique.
Sherburne … not only designed his company’s fitting system but also serves as the “dean” of the training program it runs for fitters, dubbed Club Champion University.
Fifteen years later, Club Champion is regarded as the leading custom golf club fitting outfit in the game and has grown to own and operate 152 fitting studios — 141 in the U.S. and 11 in Canada, the UK and Australia. Each one has access to more than 65 brands and can provide customers with more than 65,000 hittable head and shaft combinations.
Along the way, the company has embraced new technologies as they have come along. Such as artificial intelligence, which it employs to streamline the process of finding optimum clubheads and shafts.
“We call it our AI fitter co-pilot,” said Sherburne, who not only designed his company’s fitting system but also serves as the “dean” of the training program it runs for fitters, dubbed Club Champion University. “It allows us to be faster and more efficient and effective.”
The advance also enables the company to keep growing.
The father of three children chuckles when he thinks of the business life he has built for himself in golf – and how so much of that comes from where he grew up.
“I was raised in a farm community outside Chicago called Princeton,” Sherburne said. “My parents were not farmers. My dad worked the graveyard shift at a printing company and my mother for the Department of Human Services. But coming of age in a small town like that really helped me.
“Places like that are full of entrepreneurs because there is not a lot of other stuff to do. You have to figure out something to do for yourself, and because there are not a lot of resources, you then have to make things work with what you have.
“I have always done my own thing as a result,” added Sherburne, who ended up buying a 200-acre farm in Princeton where he grows corn and soybeans and hunts deer and wild turkey – and where he tries to impart the same lessons of his youth to his children when they go there on weekends.
“I have always tried to forge my own destiny. I love to build things, and I love my work, especially because what I do at Club Champion has never felt like work.”
Maybe that is why it has worked out so well.
John Steinbreder
