The Mini Driver Movement - Henry Shimp
At this point, if you watch even a little bit of professional golf, you probably have seen a player or two pull the “mini driver” that seems to be taking over the professional game both on the player and manufacturing focus side. It feels like everyone is at least trying one, and every manufacturer is realizing they need to be making one.
Taylormade was the original player in the mini driver game, dating all the way back to 2014. More on that later. And now in just the last 6 months we have seen Callaway, Titleist, and PXG all flock to the market, fielding requests from their players to implement one. I almost wish there was a better story as to what a mini driver is, but for better or worse it is exactly what it sounds like. A smaller headed, shorter length driver that is meant to go a bit straighter and shorter as well as be slightly easier to hit off the ground than a full sized driver. In today’s world of golf clubs, an average driver head is about 440 cubic centimeters (cc), an average mini driver is about 310cc, and an average 3-wood is about 180cc. So it sits right in between the traditional driver and 3-wood. Similarly on the loft side, while many players on tour opt for lower lofts, it is still standard for a driver head to be 9-11 degrees of loft whereas the mini ranges from 11.5-13.5. Length wise, drivers are 45-46 inches and minis are 42-44. So whether it’s loft, length or head size, everything is tamed down a bit which lends itself to greater accuracy and a bit less distance off the tee.
Building directly off the above, before getting into the exact players who are using the mini driver and why, let’s talk about the avatar of a mini driver user and what has created for it having so many compelling use cases at the tour level. Looking through a brief Q and A with the original mini driver product developer, Brian Bazzel, the idea behind it 10 years ago was highly progressive given its use today. The original concept was to create a “goldilocks” club for long players off the tee who don’t always need driver from a pure distance standpoint but also don’t want to give away their length advantage by grabbing 3-wood too often. Further, his concept behind why a 3-wood doesn’t make sense off the tee too often was that it simply wasn’t designed for that. A 3-wood is designed to be hit most optimally off the ground, much like a driver is designed to be hit off a tee, so the idea behind a mini was to give longer players a club that can perhaps do both. Oftentimes the jack of all trades effort is a failed one, but in the case of the mini, that does not appear to be the case.
Some of the players who have given the mini driver the level of credence that it has garnered are Tommy Fleetwood, Adam Scott, Max Greyserman, Jake Knapp, Rory McIlroy, and Josele Luis Ballester. The common thread among all these players is clearly length, but also overall tier 1 driving capability. Length as well as a high level of accuracy even with the standard big stick. What has pushed many of these guys into the mini is equal parts advancements in club and ball technology as well as how PGATour level courses are being presented to players these days. We’ll dive more into the architecture side of things later on, but for now let’s focus on advanced statistics and the “moneyball” style of play that has led to the mini driver and is itself a major contributor to architecture and how the mini has come to be so significant in the year 2025, and in my opinion likely only continues to be that way.
Bryson and his distance movement was the first to really show us how important it is to hit the ball hard. The statistical exploitation he uncovered was that ultimately the idea of “drive for show, putt for dough” is a fallacy and that from a purely strokes gained perspective, distance off the tee is the best way to gain strokes with your driver, and gaining strokes with your driver is the “lowest hanging fruit” for overall strokes gained improvement. Now, I have always been a believer in two things. One, stats are stats, and they shouldn’t be argued with. Two, there is nuance to everything, and it is important to understand it.
What I mean by this is that there is no doubt hitting the ball far has become abundantly important in today’s professional game. That said, I believe the “hit it far and go find it” mentality does not hold up on every golf course. There are absolutely places where you need to find fairways and being in the rough or elsewhere simply doesn’t play. Insert the mini driver. For a player who already has plenty of distance, they don’t always need to hit it 330 off the tee. But, they are giving away tangible strokes to pull back to 3-wood and hit it 280 and give away their distance advantage. So what if there was a tweener strategy where they were to feel they gain a bit more accuracy without giving up too much of their distance advantage? That would be the mini driver.
The mini driver is a perfect example of the mindset that you actually don’t win by sharpening your knives for a gun fight. You win by bringing faster guns to a gun fight. Otherwise put, your good stuff needs to be really good rather than your bad stuff being less bad. Why would a supreme short game player like Mickelson carry a 60 and a 64? Because that is the part of the game he separates from the field in, so he wants to be as good as possible in that area. The same goes for a mini driver. Someone who is superior off the tee needs to gain as much of an advantage from the tee box on the rest of the field as possible every time they put a peg in the ground. So a special situation club like the mini can be a good tool to help them do that.
Architecture also has a lot to do with the rise of the mini and the need for a club that goes right around 300 yards and ideally quite straight. Modern PGA Tour courses typically pinch in fairways around 320 to where hitting driver much beyond that becomes more situational than needed on every hole. Herein lies the mini driver use case for longer hitters. Guys who can hit it 330 without issue but don’t want to lay back too far when 330 isn’t needed can step down to a mini driver and feel like they are now hitting it a similar distance to the rest of the field while having greater accuracy given the mini driver’s lower dispersion than a full headed driver. When certain players start to hit the mini driver well, it can be a nearly addicting tee club. Jake Knapp in his first win this year in Mexico, Tommy Fleetwood at various events, and Max Greyserman in his first tour victory are all examples of players who put the mini driver in play on a given week and hit it more often than the full blown big stick. When certain courses demand greater accuracy off the tee than they do raw distance, for long players it makes more sense to opt for 300 and straight versus 330 and less straight.
There is also another less spoken of trend on tour that is giving rise to the mini driver. Many of you may have noticed that long irons (2 and 3 irons) are becoming glorified tee clubs for those using them and the real trend for the 3rd or so longest club in the bag is a 6, 7, or 8 wood. This is another architecture and stats driven trend in the professional game. What players are realizing is that for one there is a lot more value to a longer club having versatility into the increasingly firm greens they are presented with in today’s game. And second, and this plays off the mini driver, there is increased value in hitting either a driver or mini driver off the tee as much as possible so the traditional 3-wood and 2 iron tee play has less value. Players would rather say their tee clubs are 4 iron when they really need to lay back, mini driver to dial back a little, and then big stick the rest of the time. The 6, 7 , and 8 woods afford players the ability to actually hit greens and have ball control into par 5’s from 250 yards whereas the penetrating flight driving irons don’t produce the same flight conditions into the green that make for a logical approach club.
Longer holes that pinch in quickly around 320 and firmer greens are two key elements that have particularly bigger hitters realizing that there is little place in the world if they are to keep their tee advantage to drop back much further than a mini driver.
In the final section of this piece, I want to talk a bit about how statistics have correlated to ball striking in recent years and why that makes me believe the mini driver won’t be a flash in the pan.
I read a great article [From Data Golf] about correlations overtime between different categories of strokes gained and the overall importance of each one from the 1980’s up until now that is really thought provoking around why players may implement different clubs and how architecture is also involved with that.
My main 3 takeaways from the article are:
Strokes gained approach will always be king.
Driving distance and accuracy correlate highly with approach play, but accuracy is more important.
Driving distance is seeing a greater level of importance to players’ overall performance in the last 12-15 years of the professional game.
I highly recommend at least skimming the article or looking through the charts if you find this stuff interesting, but for the purposes of this writing, below are some of the extrapolations to the mini driver more specifically.
If we can all agree that on a raw percentage of overall strokes taken, but also from a skill standpoint that strokes gained tee to green is by far the most important metric to rank well on in pro golf, then driving essentially becomes a conduit for each player to give themselves the best chance to maximize the most important category within SG TTG which is approach play. It’s a constant balancing act when you consider that driving accuracy correlates slightly higher with approach play than distance (partially correlating skill sets, partially a product of being in the fairway), but that the two are more or less in the same ballpark of correlation. The correlation between both distance and accuracy and approach the green explains why the mini driver is a club that has gained so much use in recent years and I believe will only continue to. Golf has become more and more of a power game and the way young kids are being taught to swing the club is one that produces significantly more power than methods taught 15-20 years ago.
Distance and power has become a better and better way to be successful on the PGATour when you look at how the correlation between distance and total dollars earned has increased over time; however, to think that only hitting the ball further and neglecting where it goes is a foolproof way to make more money as a pro golfer is an oversight. Accuracy is equally important off the tee, and most importantly there has become an upper bound on many golf holes on the PGATour where it becomes significantly more challenging to find the fairway based on where bunkers are placed and holes pinch in. These are all reasons why a club like the mini driver makes sense for longer hitters who already have the distance part of strokes gained off the tee taken care of. Now they are looking to optimize the two variables of distance and accuracy which both mean a lot to overall performance.
Based on the trajectory of golf from an architecture, athleticism, and statistical standpoint, there is reason to believe the mini driver will make its way into a lot more PGATour, collegiate, and amateur bags in the coming years. All signs point to distance being just as important going forward as it has become today, but like anything, to focus too much on one thing and miss the nuance that comes with it is a recipe for failure, and the mini driver is the exact answer for players who have focused on distance or are naturally gifted with it, but still acknowledge the other parts of driving and the game at large that matter.
Cheers,