The small yet substantial tweak Tommy Fleetwood just made to his golf bag

They say it's the tiny tweaks that add up to make all the difference for golfers at a pro level – something that Tommy Fleetwood can clearly attest to.

The Englishman has started the 2026 season in relatively solid fashion, scoring Top 10 finishes at both The Players Championship and The Genesis Invitational. However the world number 3 is still tweaking his set-up in order to recapture his FedEx Cup-winning form in time for the start of major season.

Highest on his agenda is, apparently, his flat stick, which has undergone a small but notable change for this weekend's Valero Texas Open with the removal of the unique alignment aid Fleetwood has long used on his TaylorMade Spider Tour putter.

"The Spider head that I will be using is just the same head that I’ve used for a while now, almost a year," Fleetwood explained. "Just a different visual on top. Look, I actually haven’t putted very well this year. It’s been one of the sort of more disappointing ways that I’ve started the year.

"I haven’t played how I wanted to, and sometimes it’s nothing more to it than you just need something different to look at, like a slightly different visual or something, just to change up your mindset a little bit. So that’s why I changed the sightlines."

Fleetwood's Spider was notable for its custom alignment aid, which was hand-drawn on to the club by his putting coach and consisted of many small horizontal lines travelling their way along the putter face. His new one is far simpler, with two vertical lines and a dot in the middle that helps centre the club and facilitate visual focus.

As part of his tinkering, Fleetwood was also snapped testing out TaylorMade's prototype Spider F model: a forked mallet similar in shape to an Odyssey #7. The Spider F has already made its way into one bag on tour, with Pierceson Coody debuting it 

"That new Spider, beautiful putter," he continued. "So I used to try the hundreds of different putters, but I used like the same putter for about eight years. I tried less putters over the last year, but I still enjoy just tinkering because you never know what you’re going to find, even if it just makes you feel better about your putter. 

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"I just like hitting different putters. Who knows, it might be something that I put in at some point. It’s a nice other option. Yeah, it’s always good to test stuff."

Fleetwood enters this weekend's Valero Texas Open ranked 122nd in strokes gained on the green having finished last year's season in the top 20 of putters on Tour. Time will tell if this small tweak will go any way to helping him climb the standings once more.