Why This Popular Type Of Club Is Dying Out On Tour

Over the years, men’s professional golf has witnessed some truly iconic moments powered by hybrid clubs. I still vividly recall Todd Hamilton artfully navigating Royal Troon with his Sonartec hybrid to claim the 2004 Open Championship, and nobody can forget Y.E. Yang outplaying the legendary Tiger Woods at the 2009 PGA Championship using what felt like a bag packed with them!

Scanning recent equipment setups on the PGA and DP World Tours reveals a surprising trend: even top-tier hybrids are losing their spots in the bags of elite male golfers. In fact, just a single player - Russell Henley - in the top ten of the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) routinely carries a hybrid.

Xander Schauffele comes nearest to breaking that trend with his occasional Callaway Apex UW. While pitched as a crossover between a wood and a hybrid, its hosel diameter, CG placement, and overall shaft length make it, for all practical purposes, a fairway wood.

When you spread that search to the Top 20 (at the time of writing), there is only one other hybrid club present, belonging to Scotsman Robert MacIntyre.

So if we do the math of 20 players x 14 clubs (maximum permissible), that is just two hybrid clubs out of 280 individual clubs on display in the top 20 bags in the world.

Historically, hybrid counts at PGA Tour events easily stretched into triple digits, but recently, it is a rarity if that figure even breaks 30 during a given week.

So, what accounts for this shift? While there isn't a single definitive reason, conversations with tour reps and tour pros point toward a strong likelihood.

Even during their peak, hybrids posed challenges for elite ball-strikers. High-speed players frequently battled a destructive hook, leading manufacturers to reposition the internal Center of Gravity horizontally to create a more neutral ball flight. Nevertheless, the club's current drop in popularity still stems directly from the tricky mechanics of CG placement.

I’ve often described Center of Gravity to colleagues as a stabilizing anchor. If you stand upright with feet together and get pushed in the chest, you're easily knocked off balance. Shift your trail leg back, however, and your CG drops backward, making you far more stable - a dynamic that perfectly mirrors hybrids versus fairway woods.

Because of their shallower front-to-back profile, hybrids place the CG much closer to the face, leaving them less forgiving on off-center hits.

Conversely, the larger footprint of 5, 7, and 9-woods projects the CG further back, creating superior stability and far less volatility at impact. This added forgiveness is precisely why so many elite players now favor high-lofted fairway woods over their traditional hybrid counterparts.

The obvious decline in the popularity of the hybrid may also, in part, be down to the emergence of the ‘utility iron’ over the past few years. Around 2014, a number of manufacturers started to release specialist ‘driving iron’ style clubs as hotter, long iron replacements, such as the Ping IDI and the Titleist T250U.

Over the subsequent decade, these clubs have been improved and fine-tuned in terms of CG and, as such, launch, to provide a very similar offering in terms of performance to a hybrid, but in a more compact and workable profile. As such, to my mind - and seemingly the mind of the top male professionals in the world - there is a good case to suggest that there is not only one but two more attractive options in that area of the bag.

However, when you flip over to the Women’s World Rankings, you will currently only find Australia's Hannah Green out of the world's top ten, not regularly (even Green occasionally puts a Ping G425 hybrid in the bag), using at least one hybrid club, with many opting for as many as three hybrids in the bag.

Why the difference, then? After all, LPGA Tour pros are top-tier talents as well.

The short answer comes down to swing speed.

Trackman data highlights a clear gap between the two tours: PGA Tour players average 115 mph with the driver, whereas the LPGA Tour average sits at 96 mph. That gap persists further down the bag, with PGA Tour 7-iron speeds averaging 92 mph compared to 78 mph on the LPGA Tour.

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This gap affects play in two key ways. First, as swing speed decreases, generating enough height with long irons like a 3, 4, or 5-iron gets far harder. Consequently, many female pros smartly opt for hybrids with lower CG profiles to achieve their ideal trajectory, whereas most PGA Tour players have no issue launching long irons high into the air.

Second, the volatility caused by a hybrid's forward CG becomes far more pronounced at higher speeds. An LPGA Tour player swinging a hybrid around 87 mph experiences much less flight volatility than a PGA Tour player swinging that same club north of 100 mph. Put simply, faster swings amplify offline dispersion.

There are some potential learnings here for recreational golfers everywhere, however. In my experience as a PGA Professional and custom fitter, the average male club golfers tend to sit a lot closer to the speed numbers of the LPGA Tour players, and as such would do well to look at more ‘What’s In The Bag’ content from the likes of Nelly Korda or Lydia Ko, than Rory McIlroy or Scottie Scheffler.

Hybrids undoubtedly still have their place in the game at the recreational level - in fact, I would encourage their use. However, as you can see, the male tour players appear to be gravitating towards alternatives - it will be interesting to see if that trend continues.