Club Count Golf Bag Review

Club Count

An all-too-frequent sight on my rounds of golf is a guy in a cart driving back down the fairway toward the previous green. Invariably, he’ll stop and ask “Did you see a wedge on the last hole?”

More often than not, I’ll have the club in my bag. When you hoof it, you see a lot of things that guys running around in carts don’t.

I also find a lot of clubs lying about that no one comes to claim. I don’t know whether they’ve been discarded for bad behavior, or simply forgotten. At the end of the round, I’ll give them to the pro, who tosses them into a bin with other abandoned sticks.

I’ve never personally left a club near a green. That’s because as a walker, I take my clubs with me wherever I go. But it’s easy to see how it happens. You park the cart by the green, pull out your putter, a wedge or two and your chipping iron—just in case—and schlep the whole pile down to the green. Then after getting up and down, you head back to the buggy with your putter, forgetting the other clubs in your celebration.

When I was learning the game, my pro friend told me that I should always place my spare clubs across the flag as I lay it on the ground. That way, I would be reminded to pick it up when I returned the stick to the cup.

But not everyone follows that advice, obviously.

To help those hapless hackers, a company called Club Count has developed technology that counts the number of clubs in your bag.

To use it, you insert your clubs into the fourteen slots, and the press the button on a plastic box hidden in one of the bag’s pockets. You then stand back as the device assesses what’s present.

During your round, the bag activates if two or more clubs are pulled for longer than eight seconds. Upon returning the clubs to the bag, it counts to make sure everything is in its place.

If your return fewer clubs than you removed, a short alarm goes off, and two lights on the sides of the bag begin to flash. It’ll stop when you return the missing clubs.

I’ve deliberately played the last two rounds from a motor cart, and also run it through a good deal of testing in the garage. It worked very well in nearly every scenario I could think of.

It works if you have fewer than 14 clubs at the beginning of a round; if you pull 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or more clubs. It works if you return one out of four, or two out of six, or all but one in any combination. And it works with both graphite and steel shafts.

In short, the Club Count simply works. With this bag, there isn’t any reason to leave a club behind again.

The bag itself is top quality, and has a heavy duty rubber top. There are plenty of pockets—although one is occupied by the club counting unit. It’ll serve you well for many years in the back of a cart.

It’s a great product—with one major issue: the warning beep is set at too high a pitch. I simply can’t hear it.

Now, it wouldn’t be too bad if it was only the occasional deaf GolfBlogger using the bag. But that high pitch is going to be out of the hearing range of a large number of players. As it is, the flashing lights work perfectly well for me, but I’m used to seeing lights go off instead of hearing beeps (my phones are set this way).

When hearing starts to go—as in, say, 80 million retiring baby boomers who spent their youths listening to high decible rock music—it’s the higher frequencies that go first. That’s why so many older men seem to have trouble hearing their wives. Female voices are at the high end. I can’t understand most women and childrens’ voices, but have perfectly normal hearing in the range where most men’s voices lurk.

It’s not just a problem with the Club Count, but with nearly every bit of electronics out there. Those dang beeps are just too high. And it’s not a matter of the volume. No matter how loud something is, if you can’t hear that frequency, you can’t hear it.

Club Count could make this an A+ product by tuning the beep down to at least a midrange frequency.

But that one issue aside, this is a product that I think would be useful and a good buy for people who play redominately in carts, and who from time to time forget to bag all their clubs. I can safely recommend it.