Jason Day showed up at this week’s PGA Tour event with several new clubs in the bag. So far, so good. He got off to a fast start with a 3-under 68 at Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah on Thursday at the 2025 Bank of Utah Championship.
Day, 37, is an equipment free agent and hasn’t been shy about switching clubs, using both cavity back and blade sets from multiple brands this season. But after two months off after failing to make the Tour Championship, Day is rocking Avoda irons, a boutique brand based in Pittsburgh that gained national attention when Bryson DeChambeau began using its irons last year, including when he won the U.S. Open.
“Hadn’t been hitting my irons great at all. I decided to have a chat to my coach, Colin (Swatton), and say, do you reckon we can go out and just maybe have a look?” Day recalled. “I don’t have an OEM sponsor so I’m a free agent there so I can go out and see what the best of the best is.”
Day said he stumbled upon Avoda and asked Swatton to chat with the company.
“He got off the phone” Day said, “and called me and he goes, ‘Man, in all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never come across the guys the way they explained everything.’ So we met in person. Did a lot of 3D printing of the iron head the way that I wanted to look at it.”
Day hit 12 of 14 fairways and missed only four greens in the first round at Black Desert Golf Course. The Aussie said he’d like to see a bit more offset to elevate the ball more easily. He planned to provide feedback to Avoda next week and make some refinements. Day also switched to graphite shafts.
“So instead of playing the X7s that I have played in the past, which is 136 gram shaft, I would play a 110 gram shaft, which is nice,” he said. “And then playing the JumboMax grips as well. So there is just number of things from the curved irons to the graphite shafts and the JumboMax grips. The theory I think I have the same profile shaft from 60-degree all the way up to driver.
“The goal is to be able to swing, just pretty much have one swing like whatever ball flight you want, whether that’s a draw or a fade. For me it’s a draw. To go up there and hit a draw and pretty much put the same swing on it and hopefully it produces the same shot over and over again.”
Day wasn’t done yet in going through his changes to the bag, noting he was only playing with 13 clubs and not 14, the maximum number of clubs permitted.
“I’m missing a club,” he explained. “I would like to play a 23-degree, and that would fit perfectly between the 21-degree and the 5-iron that I’m playing. It goes about 230, 229. The 21-degree Apex, Callaway, that goes about 250 in the air, so I need something right smack between it and that should cover the whole thing.”
Day finished 41st on the FedEx Cup standings and already has secured his card for next season and access to all of the signature events, so he’s using the fall start as part of what he termed his “testing phase” for next season.
“We still got to get the gappings right, have to get the spins right, so obviously that is going to be more testing coming up for me,” he said. “But that’s something that we have to kind of mess with the grooves a little bit, try and make sure that like we get a little bit more spin, but also make sure that they’re up to regulation. Hopefully that makes things hitting shots into the greens a lot easier.”
