New Golf Entrepreneurs: Jesse Koenig, Never Lose A Club Again

If you’re a golfer, this has probably happened to you.  You get to the clubhouse or worse yet, home, and suddenly you realize a wedge is missing.  Or some other club has gone walkabout. You curse.  A lot.

Almost every club costs more than $100 these days, particularly putters and wedges, the ones that most often disappear. They can easily be $200, $300, and more.

Now, the days of replacing lost clubs may be over. A guy has invented something to keep it from happening.

Meet Jesse Koenig.  He’s been there, done that, and resolved to create something to keep it from ever happening again.

“For me personally, I’ve never completely lost one where I’ve had to buy a new one,” Koenig said. “I’ve always been able to go back and find them, but that experience is so miserable.”

According to Koenig’s website, it happens five million times a year.  So, if it’s happened to you, you’re not alone. That’s why many golf shops have a lost and found barrel.

Jesse Koenig said the situation usually goes like this:

“I realize I don’t have the wedge,” he began. “I tell my group, ‘Sorry guys. I got to go back and get it.’

“Now I’m going back around the course interrupting people, ‘Hey, have you seen it?’ because I don’t remember which hole I left it on.”

The most common scenario, as golfers know, is taking a sand wedge and a putter out at the same time and leaving the wedge, but it could be any club.

As Jesse Koenig says about himself, he can be absent-minded.

We all can be. Club Catcher fixes that, at least for golf.

The Club Catcher is a device that screws into the top of the grip on as many clubs as you want to put it on.  You can buy singles or four packs. And they pair with your phone or smartwatch.

The Club Catchers have timers that start when the club leaves the bag.  The device knows if you’ve taken out multiple clubs.

When you come back to the bag, if you don’t put everything back within what the device thinks is a reasonable time, the phone or watch sends an alarm.  Not a fire engine kind of alarm, but it lets you know a club is missing.

“We don’t want them to get to the next hole, so they (can) go grab their wedge before they get too far away and forget where they left it,” Koenig explained.

In other words, with Club Catchers, you can’t get back to the clubhouse without clubs.

To get technical about what’s in the thingamabob that attaches to your club, it has a light sensor (because the bottom of the bag is dark!), an accelerometer which acts as an angle sensor ( because a club lying on the grass is not vertical!), a Bluetooth radio part and a microcontroller, which is a little computer.

That’s a lot to pack into a device the size of a club top.  But it’s there.

“I dabbled with it for years,” Jesse Koenig admitted.  “But I co-founded an electronic manufacturing company, did that, and left that last year and decided I would really finally do this.”

It has taken him two years to get it right.

“It’s been a lot of work,” he admitted.

You can buy as many Club Catchers as you want through Koenig’s website.

It’s $25 for a single and $79 for a 4-pack. Do you think they are perfect holiday gifts?  Santa says yes. Buy early.  You know those supply glitches.

With these little devices, no one should ever lose a club on the course again.

Airports are another matter!