Dimple patterns and their flight effect

Another common questions sent into Dean is: "How does the ball dimple pattern change flight and distance?"

The dimples are extremely important in golf ball design. Once we have the final ball design, we measure the spin rates of the golf balls, then design the dimples to optimize the flight.

If you have a higher spinning ball, you would look to make the dimples a little deeper, to help keep the flight down. For lower spinning balls, the dimples are typically a bit shallower to help the ball fly higher and stay in the air.

The dimples work to break the air around the ball in flight, and have two key characteristics that are measured: Lift and Drag. The ideal dimple design is a combination balancing the lift and drag of the ball. We vary the diameters, shapes, total coverage, edge angles to control these two key variables. If you get the dimples wrong, you can be substantially short in distance and that is for sure not preferred!

There are 350 dimples on the MY TOUR BALL. Most all golf balls run between 300 and 400 dimples.. The number is not the important factor. We control the size, shapes, depths, edge angles to get the proper flight and trajectory for the ball based on the spin rates of the balls. Example, PROV1 has 352, for a long time Titliest had a 332 pattern, a 392 pattern, and TaylorMade uses 322 dimples on one ball and 360 dimples on another, so all of them are in the same range.

Hope that helps to understand dimple patterns and why they matter!