What golf ball is best for you? This handy online app will tell you
Ballnamic is an agnostic fitting tool developed by Ping that allows golfers to find the right ball for their game.
Photo: Jeffrey Westbrook/Stylist: Miako Katoh
We recently published our ultimate 2024 Golf Ball Guide, in which we reviewed and recommended 48 golf balls for your game. Scroll below for more from our 2024 Golf Ball Guide package.
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ICYMI: Buying golf balls? Make sure to understand their construction
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What golf ball is best for you? This handy online app will tell you
When it comes to getting fit for the right equipment, most golfers understand that factors like driver loft, shaft flex, iron type and wedge bounce all play a big part in getting the most from their golf game. But what about the golf ball?
This is where Ballnamic comes in. Developed by Ping to better understand how various balls impact distance, flight, spin and even its performance from the rough, Ballnamic is an agnostic fitting tool that allows a golfer — for less than the price of a dozen premium golf balls ($39) — to find the right ball for their game.
The online app takes data points based on a golfer’s current handicap, most common playing conditions — including altitude — driver launch and spin, iron launch and spin and preferred trajectory and asks about the performance variables that are most important to them. From there, the fitting algorithm kicks into high gear, recommending five golf balls ranked by performance for the golfer to consider. It can even factor in price.
So how do they do it?
With the help of their in-house swing robot, PingMan, along with a quadrascopic launch monitor and 3D radar-based system, engineers capture every 0.01 second of the golf ball through flight to get accurate information on downrange accuracy, height and final landing angle. From there, the data gets fed into Ballnamic’s algorithm.
One of the most interesting things about the testing process — where Ping strives to eliminate as many variables as possible at its Proving Ground headquarters in Phoenix — is that data capture happens in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning when conditions are most calm. This is possible because the radar-based launch monitor doesn’t need to actually see the ball to capture data.
As Ping’s VP of fitting and performance, Marty Jertson, explains, this type of accuracy is what makes Ballnamic so helpful to golfers.
“One of the most exciting advancements with Ballnamic is that, for the first time in the golf industry, we decouple and approximate a ball’s initial launch conditions with its aerodynamic performance. It’s counterintuitive, but we’ve seen low-launch, low-spin golf balls that fly high, and high-launch, high-spin balls that fly low,” Jertson says. “Ballnamic doesn’t factor in traditional ball selection criteria, such as construction and number of layers. Instead, it strictly focuses on tested performance characteristics, algorithmic equations and mathematical approximations.”
This might sound complicated, but Ping is all about simplifying the process. Ballnamic takes but a few minutes to calculate the end results. And, when it comes to results, don’t be surprised if the golf ball that ends up being the best match for you isn’t the one you’re currently using. With so many models on the market, it’s next to impossible to test each one. Let Ballnamic do the heavy lifting.
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