Pioneering Texan Revolutionizes Performance with Innovative Weighting
A small company in Rockport, Texas, founded and operated by a longtime TGA Member and 40-year golf industry veteran, is taking on golf’s major equipment manufacturers with its inventive wedge designs. Edison Golf has a novel concept, one that has made companies such as Titleist, Callaway, and TaylorMade sit up and take notice.
Drawing on his 30 years of studying and designing wedges, Terry Koehler created the Edison Forged Wedges specifically for the 99.9% of golfers in the world who don’t have the extraordinary skills of professional golfers. It’s worth repeating: Edison Wedges are not made for tour players. Rather, Terry Koehler’s unique wedges are explicitly suited for the serious weekend warrior, recreational type of golfer.
Koehler, who sports a tidy 1.9 Handicap Index® at Rockport Country Club, is a fourth-generation Texan. As early as 1990, Koehler was designing wedges with more weight placed higher on the back of the clubhead to add forgiveness and deliver more spin and penetrating trajectories.
After studying more than 60,000 wedge-fitting profiles collected by his various club companies, and observing hundreds of wedges in golfers’ bags, it was painfully obvious to Koehler as to why so many people struggle with their wedges. The fitting data revealed that about 80% of golfers across all handicaps report that they hit the ball too high, don’t get enough spin, and consistently come up short of their target.
Koehler conducted numerous tests – both with robotic and real golfers – on the major brands’ “tour design” wedges. He found the issues above are built into those traditional wedge designs that haven’t changed much in the past four decades.
The problem with tour design wedges, according to Koehler, is that tour pros hit their wedges much differently than the rest of us. If you look at the wedges in the bag of tour pros, Koehler explains, you’ll see a wear pattern around the third groove from the bottom of the clubface that’s about the size of a dime. Recreational golfers’ wedges, in contrast, typically show a wear pattern two to four grooves higher on the face and it is much larger, something closer to a silver dollar.
Koehler understood that only a dramatic change in wedge design, one with the center of mass distributed higher on the back of the clubhead, would help recreational golfers become much more consistent with their wedge play from full swings to all those shots we face around the green.
“Golfers have been chasing forgiveness in their drivers, fairway woods, hybrids, irons, and putters for years,” Koehler said. “But they don’t realize their wedges are the least forgiving clubs in their bags because of the way the major manufacturers design them. And next to the putter, your wedges are the most important scoring clubs you have. It doesn’t make sense.”
It’s a refrain Koehler has been extolling for decades. When he attended the 2022 PGA Show in January, Koehler noticed something. The new lines of wedges from the major brands were sporting a bit more mass higher in the clubhead. He couldn’t help but giggle a little.
“It’s flattering, for sure, but none of them are even close to where I was with my first wedge designs in the early 1990s,” he said. “I’ve been ahead of them all for over 25 years. They all know it works, but they are held back by their paid tour staff professionals, who can’t afford dramatic changes in their wedges.”
Edison Golf’s forged wedges have up to 25% more mass behind and above the true impact zone on recreational golfers’ scoring clubs than even the most advanced offering from the major brands.
There’s more to Edison Golf’s wedges, however. Every one of them has the innovative “Koehler Sole” technology, which combines a low and high bounce to provide maximum versatility. This dual-edge bounce is something you won’t see in the major brands’ wedges. The high-bounce leading portion of the sole and low-bounce trailing portion allows the club to perform equally well from soft or firm turf while accommodating shallow or steep swings.
Since Koehler launched Edison Golf in 2020, he has sold thousands of wedges to all kind of golfers who want more forgiveness and better results from their scoring clubs. He said he’s had less than 2% of his customers return the wedges per the company’s 30-day Performance Guarantee.
“We custom fit and custom build every wedge right here in Rockport,” Koehler said. “We ensure each golfer gets the right lofts, shafts, grips, and specifications to optimize their scoring range performance. And if it doesn’t do that, we’ll buy it back.”
To learn more about Edison Golf, click here.
