Are You Ready for a Hollow Metal-Core Ball?

They’ve taken a while to catch on, but OnCore’s time is coming.

Tony Dear

Like most people who lost their jobs as a result of the economy imploding in 2008, friends Bret Blakely and Steve Coulton spent time in coffee shops pondering their next moves.

At the time, Blakely’s father Keith, an entrepreneur in the high-tech and advanced materials industries, was leading a start-up nanotech firm in Buffalo, NY, called NanoDynamics. Besides cell-pore water filters, solid oxide fuel cells and carbon nano-tubes, the company also developed a golf ball.

Created by the company’s Director of Product Commercialization Doug DuFaux, this ball was unlike other golf balls. It had a hollow metal core.

The metal core increased the ball’s perimeter-weighting which raised its Moment of Inertia (MoI) and made it significantly straighter than its competitors. But it didn’t promise extra yards—the only thing capable of making golfers switch brands.

With no experience marketing golf products, the NanoDynamics’ NDMX never really took off, so to speak.

No problem. Two young, eager, recently laid-off professionals with managerial, analytical, and communications skills were available. So, while they continued looking for long-term positions, Coulton and Blakely Jr. offered to try finding a market for the NDMX.

“Steve and I asked my dad if we could help market the ball Doug had created,” says Blakely. “But he explained there was no company to do that, and that we would have to form one ourselves. He promised to set up the opportunity for us to pitch Doug, help with the legalese and paperwork, and get the intellectual property moved over if, after six months, we had done our research and were still keen on the idea.”

They had and they were, so in March 2009 Coulton and Blakely incorporated their new firm: OnCore Golf. Two years passed before they bought the ball – now called the Omen – back to market. It had some success locally, but Coulton and Blakely wanted to expand their operation so began a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 in order to raise the funds necessary for OnCore Golf and the Omen ball to go national. They raised over $20,000 and plenty more besides from venture capitalists curious about this apparently new technology.

With a new dimple design and a couple of other design tweaks, the Omen became the Evo, which attracted a fair bit of coverage. But it suffered a major setback in the summer of 2013 when the United States Golf Association (USGA) deemed it non-conforming. The NDMX and Omen had appeared on the USGA’s official Conforming Golf Balls list, but not the Evo. The USGA felt it did not adhere to the rule that the ball “must not be substantially different from the traditional and customary form and make.”

Blakely appealed saying the ball conformed to the Rules’ five quantifiable metrics – weight, size, spherical symmetry, initial velocity, and overall distance standard, and that a dozen or more metal-core balls had been approved in the past, primarily during the 1960s.

He had an ace up his sleeve too.

Earlier in the year, Nike had released the 20X1, its first ball to feature the RZN core. Its advertising claimed the new core represented a “hammer blow to the traditional construction of golf balls.”  

Blakely soon received notification the Evo would be added to the Conforming Golf Ball list.

In January 2014, OnCore released the MA 1.0 which, like its predecessors, flew noticeably straighter than other balls, and also rolled extremely smoothly on the greens. What let it down slightly, was its retail price— $44 a dozen, which put it in the same company as the Titleist Pro-V1, Nike RZN Platinum/Black, Srixon Z-Star, and TaylorMade Tour Preferred.

By now OnCore had begun working with a couple of big name golf ball engineers. Blakely has held off revealing their identities, however, because he doesn’t want “the big companies catching wind of it yet.”

OnCore took another giant stride in January when it launched the two-piece, all-rubber, 65 compression Avant. And last week, it maintained its solid momentum with the release of the three-piece, hollow metal-core Caliber, a direct descendant of the MA 1.0.

Like the Avant ($20), the Caliber has been impressive in independent testing and is considerably less expensive than its predecessor—just $30/dozen. “We want to attract millennials,” says Blakely. “It’s our way of helping to grow the game.”

The Caliber is an 80-compression ball giving it a softer feel than the 95-compression MA 1.0. A Tour ball featuring several of the patented technologies developed by OnCore is in the works, and will be launched at the 2017 PGA Merchandise Show.

Until then, give the Caliber a whirl. A hollow metal-core golf ball might sound like golf tech gone mad, but guess what…you won’t be able to see it. All you are likely to see, in fact, is your ball heading straight down the fairway.

More info: oncoregolf.com

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