Designed for various ages starting as early as two years old, Lynx Golf has unveiled its new Ai Junior Golf Range, which has been created to provide a set of clubs that are ideally tailored to young golfers.
For the first time in a collection of junior equipment, all component parts of the Lynx Ai range have been ‘proportionately resized’ using technology, to deliver clubs that are shorter, lighter, smaller and better-suited to young players than ever previously seen.
Lynx offers completely different club head sizes and weights in each of six height-coded sections of its Ai Junior Range. For example, a 6-iron in its smallest Blue section of clubs is 7% lighter and 7% shorter than in the next size Red section.
Similar levels of difference continue through the remaining Orange, Green, Black and Silver sections, with clubs getting progressively larger, longer and heavier.
Even the issue of ball size and weight has been addressed by Lynx, with smaller, lighter balls that are easier for younger players to get airborne.
Stephanie Zinser, one of the two owners of Lynx Golf, explains the rationale behind the innovative new range.
“Sports medicine and the understanding of how the young body grows has given us great insight into the stresses and strains that old-fashioned equipment can cause to young golfers,” she says.
“It’s no coincidence that in virtually every sport the equipment made for the younger, growing, player takes this into account – with lighter, smaller, softer footballs, to smaller, lighter tennis rackets.
“It is something that is being seen across the whole breadth of the sporting industry, yet when we at Lynx looked into this in detail, we quickly realised that something fundamental was missing in golf.
“Golf clubs for juniors, while made often with smaller clubheads and shorter shafts, are not proportionately as small and as light as the young golfer actually needs them to be.
“We have utilised a proven mix of sports science, physiology, advanced computational methods – and perhaps a dose of parental care – to create the new Lynx Ai clubs to be absolutely in the correct proportions for young golfers.
“Not only that, the entire range grows with them, proportionately, as the child progresses into their teens and adulthood.”
During their extensive research, Lynx discovered that while the overwhelming majority of junior golf clubs look smaller than adult clubs, a lot of what makes them up is the exactly the same.
Shafts might be cut shorter, but thickness remains the same. Hosels and ferrules are also identical. And while one or two smaller clubhead sizes may be offered, this is inadequate to cater for the wide span of ages and body sizes among junior players.
Added Steve Elford, Lynx Golf CEO and co-owner: “What we have done, with the help of AI and sports science, is to develop entirely new junior clubs that are directly proportional to the actual sizes of children in every component.
“Each section of the junior range we offer is proportionately different in size to the others, whether irons, putters, fairways woods or drivers.
“The entire sampling of tooling for individual components – grips, heads, shafts and right down to the ferrules and hosels – has been completely re-tooled to make sure that everything is not just smaller and lighter but is absolutely in proportion.
“Because of the way we have developed these junior golf clubs, sizes grow proportionately with the child. When they do move into the next colour-coded set of clubs, everything should feel exactly the same to them as it did before.
“They will have grown proportionately larger, so their clubs will too. It’s a perfect model for scaling up to adulthood and one which takes account of the child’s developing strength and slowly increasing swing speeds as he or she gets older, stronger, more confident and more able.”
Across the new Lynx Junior Ai Range, there are clubs to suit every age range running from two years old all the way through to teens, after which the golfer can progress up to the adult Lynx ranges.
Young players select which colour set to use based on their height when standing upright, rather than by age grouping.
Zinser explains further: “As a mother, I’ve always been concerned about young children risking injuries from trying to play sport with equipment that is not correctly designed for the way their growing bodies are.
“There are reports of increases in tendon and muscle injuries or strains in children caused by using products not designed for them and therefore we felt it so important to radically overhaul the way we do things at Lynx.
“We have made balls specifically for the younger ages which are again proportionately smaller and lighter.
“This has a double-edged benefit for kids. Firstly, they don’t risk straining on musculature which using a heavier, denser ball might cause. And secondly, because the ball is lighter, the child is able to loft the ball more easily and more often.
“The positive feedback a child gets when they can actually get the ball airborne is the one thing most likely to enthuse them to keep going with golf, because early success is often a factor in whether a child continues with a sport.
“Children become super-keen when they see positive results from their efforts in sport very quickly. It’s all well and good to talk about growing the game, but this is something that might actually turn an aspiration to get youth into golf into more of a reality.”
The Lynx Junior Ai Range will be available from December this year in time for Christmas and is once again being sold on an open stock basis, so that parents can buy exactly what their child needs and wants from good golf retailers.
The range will also be available to buy directly from www.lynxgolf.co.uk.
Single clubs start from just £22.00 each SRP.
