Labeling on a club for sale at Pro Golf shop in Bend will help educate buyers about USGA rule changes involved with groove shapes on wedges.

Cleveland Golf calls 2010 the “Year of the wedge.”

Titleist concurs that this is the year to buy a new wedge, judging by the company’s own ad campaigns.

In fact, just about every wedge manufacturer is trying to gear up for the U.S. Golf Association’s rule making “u-groove” wedges made after this Dec. 31 illegal under the USGA’s Rules of Golf.

Cleveland even offers a running clock on its stand-alone website, yearofthewedge.com, counting down to the start of the new year.

“Everybody is offering specials — Cleveland and Titleist, the major wedge distributors,” says Nelson Von Stroh, general manager of the retail shop Pro Golf of Bend. “They’ve been advertising. Cleveland coined it the ‘Year of the wedge,’ and Titleist is offering us incentives to buy them (u-groove wedges) and to have as many as we can get our hands on. It is just interesting to see what’ll happen.”

Grooves on a golf club displace debris, grass and water, allowing better contact with the ball by the club face. Simply put, the deeper the grooves, the more debris that is displaced.

U-grooves, named for their shape, replaced shallower v-grooves as the technology of choice more than 10 years ago.

The USGA’s new rule limits the edge sharpness, depth and spacing of grooves on all clubs with lofts of 25 degrees or more (generally, a 4-iron on down to a lob wedge).

The rule change makes the task of spinning a golf ball out of the rough much more difficult than in recent years, when u-groove technology, or square grooves, became commonplace.

And the rule change has already made its way to competitive golf circuits.

The PGA Tour banned u-grooves effective this year. The USGA will continue to allow golfers to use u-grooves in its amateur tournaments until 2014 — so long as the clubs were manufactured before Jan. 1, 2011.

The Oregon Golf Association has not set a date for the ban. But, says Craig Winter, the OGA’s manager of rules education: “At the very earliest we would opt to put in this condition of competition no earlier than 2014, and even then (we) would only consider it for our (Men’s, Women’s and Senior) Amateurs and possibly the Men’s Stroke Play (Championship).”

Starting in 2024, u-grooves will be banned completely from any round played under the Rules of Golf, including club games and rounds posted to handicap indexes.

The most immediate change for golfers will be seen at local golf stores.

Retail outlets have started to stockpile wedges with u-grooves in anticipation of a bump in demand.

“What you are going to see, for example, is Titleist is doing a Vokey (Titleist’s top wedge model) last call where we get a bunch of wedges in fall,” says Erik Nielsen, head pro at Bend Golf and Country Club. “And they’ll backdate (the billing), so we don’t have to pay for them as early.”

Most golf stores expect to be able to carry the u-groove wedges into the spring.

“Right now I have probably more wedges in October than I have ever had,” Nielsen says. “And we’ll just use the current wedges that we have now and carry them through the spring.”

That leaves a window of about nine months for golfers to buy legal u-groove wedges, and there is some evidence that a mild spike in demand has already has taken place.

Golfsmith, a national retail golf chain, reported in September a 22 percent year-over-year increase in wedge sales. And it predicts a 40 percent rise in sales by the end of the year.

Todd Kruse, a golf professional at Dick’s Sporting Goods store in Bend, says he has already started to see an uptick.

“I have noticed that there has been more people coming in, specifically looking to maintain that extra edge in their grooves,” Kruse says. “And they are picking up more than one wedge.

“The normal, average recreational player, the rule doesn’t come into effect until 2024. So they might be picking up two sand wedges instead of one, or a series of 52-, 56-, and 60-(degree wedges) to complement their set.”

Pro Golf of Bend has yet to see the same spike in wedge sales. But Von Stroh says he expects the marketing crush from the major manufacturers to eventually spur buying.

“I’m guessing that maybe by the (Christmas) holiday that we will have a surge of wedge sales because it will be really heavily marketed by the manufacturers,” Von Stroh says. “I don’t know, though. That’s definitely a guess.”