From sun-up to sundown, over 15,000 steps across the mounds and moguls leading to the practice range, through the corridors of the clubhouse to the locker room, or just about any other facility on the property that could prove to be fruitful for a player’s needs.

JJ Van Wezenbeeck, Titleist’s senior director of player promotions, is everywhere and anywhere on a damp and musky day in the Buckeye State for the seventh Signature Event of the season. More importantly, it’s the early stages of the Titleist Tour launch of the 2025 T-Series irons, with the team on site at the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday, providing valuable insights and data on the new iron lineup to its illustrious TOUR stars.

Jack’s Place brings out all the stars, and while those onlooking fans might not realize it, Van Wezenbeeck is one of them. In the midst of one of the most expansive iron launches, he’s in the mix with players across the leaderboard, dialing in and testing. He’s the man behind every gear switch the stars make on the biggest stages.

Despite less than appealing weather – steaming hot but rain in the air, the kind of day where wearing a rain jacket would give the feeling of a poorly maintained sauna – golfers are still out grinding from the early hours on feels and technique. Indeed, it’s the same for the Titleist team, meticulously building new designs for testing and sorting the already pre-built sets that had been made from studying the copious amounts of data they keep for each player on staff.

Van Wezenbeeck and the team of up to six professional club builders and experts travel over 35,000 miles a year in the state-of-the-art truck, with every nook and cranny specifically designed to maximize workflow and make sure that every club is built to the same exemplary standard that is required from the Titleist Club Assembly Facility in Carlsbad, California. In less than 48 hours, Van Wezenbeeck will be back there to provide feedback from players on TOUR.

Starting as a truck driver in the early 2000s, Van Wezenbeeck's hard work and dedication to players and their equipment have seen him develop into a role that values his input from the very start of research and development to the new T-Series irons on-site at the Memorial. The clubs ready to be tested in Ohio have Van Wezenbeeck’s vision detailed into them, and as one co-worker described: “He’s the busiest man in our company,” because of it.

“JJ is great; I trust him with everything that I have in terms of golf clubs,” Ludvig Åberg shared. “... JJ has got a lot of knowledge and is a really good asset for us players on the TOUR.”

After the prep work was done, the team catered to an elite cast of players pre-tournament. Starting with Tom Hoge and coach Scott Hamilton to discuss the new T250 he had in play, Van Wezenbeeck made stops along the range with Byeong Hun An – a 1-iron specialist who’s new U505 went straight into the bag – followed by Wyndham Clark, Patrick Cantlay, Robert MacIntyre, Sungjae Im, Åberg and Cameron Young. A who’s who of a lineup. Each stop involving varying amounts of communication, from a friendly catch-up to a full-on session.

“The player that gets too technical on numbers, your goal is to kind of coach them,” Van Wezenbeeck says. “It’s about asking, ‘Hey, let's look at ball flight, let's hit different shots that you'd hit in a round.’ … For the player that isn't very technical, we're trying to just use the numbers a little bit more to ourselves, but make sure that when they say, ‘Hey, that's the perfect ball flight for me,’ that we're recording those numbers so we know what we're trying to recreate for them.”

Young's engagement involved more of a discussion with his father, David, who has been his lifelong coach, examining multiple options at the top end of his bag and pointing out different Trackman numbers while his son, who now owns the title of the 1,000th winner on TOUR, whacks balls into the darkening sky. A stark difference from the previous day spent with Justin Thomas, with a substantial focus on the three Ds of Titleist fitting – distance control, dispersion control and descent angle – and the player next on Van Wezenbeeck’s itinerary.

After a quick trip back to the truck to collect more offerings – time being of the essence on a day where the weather looked to cause disturbance midafternoon – Van Wezenbeeck returned to the range to Jordan Spieth with some options. An intense session ensued, along with caddie Micahel Greller and coach Cameron McCormick, with various options in the T-Series lineup to hit. At one point, Spieth was surprised he was hitting a T350, having thought it was another head. For almost an hour, Spieth would call the shot to hit with each club, executing each fade, draw, high or low option to perfection, while McCormick would discuss the feedback with Van Wezenbeeck.

“McCormick likes a lot of the numbers because they do so much Trackman work at home and know what kind of parameters we're looking for,” Van Wezenbeeck added. “So it's really in that case, utilizing McCormick to be the numbers person, and then also me being able to get Jordan’s confirmation. … That's where I'm trying to get that communication from him and then confirm that data with McCormick.”

The work doesn’t stop for Van Wezenbeeck even when the truck packs up Wednesday evening and heads off to the next event. He’s back to meeting with the Research and Development team on the West Coast, preparing to create the next best iron on TOUR.

“We're trying to provide that feedback on what players want for the future player feedback on current product, different fitting challenges or success stories and helping that drive innovation for our R&D team," Van Wezenbeeck said.

It’s that trusted feedback, along with the hard work and preparation on-site, which has allowed the rollout of the new lineup of irons to be efficient and effective across the board. Most impressively, it led to the success stories like Aldrich Potgieter’s maiden victory at the Rocket Classic after switching into a combination set of T100, T150 and T250 irons and Grant Forrest earning his second DP World Tour victory with new T250 and T100 long irons in the bag in Scotland. It’s the reason why Titleist irons have been the most played iron on TOUR for the last 11 years.

Titleist T-Series irons are now available for purchase or fitted to the standard that Van Wezenbeeck keeps along with the team on TOUR at one of Titleist’s national fitting centers.