Stats

I’m a big fan of statistics. I enjoyed stats in grad school and find ways to use data as much as possible in my professional life to help make better decisions. Along the same lines, I’ve always felt like course management was one of my strengths, and that an intuitive sense of golf statistics was a big part of that.

I also recognize that some of what was course management gospel 20 years ago has been shown to not actually be the optimal strategy. I feel pretty strongly that at least some of the changes are due to technology itself, namely that the driver has gone from one of the hardest clubs to hit to one of the easiest. Regardless, as I’ve learned more about strokes gained and the relative contributions of different parts of the game, some of my thoughts about course management have certainly evolved.

“Normal” golfers, those who only play righty or lefty, can use one of several commercially available strokes gained systems to learn where they are losing strokes, and what parts of their game are stronger/weaker relative to their target handicap. However, this isn’t really an option for me since there is such a great skill difference between my righty and lefty sides.

Over the past couple of seasons, I’ve tried a few times to come up with some sort of way to track basic statistics on my own that might help me learn more about my shot patterns and what to focus on during my limited practice time. Nothing so far has worked. The problems seem to revolve around determining what sort of data to collect, how to collect it, how to analyze it, and perhaps most importantly, what to do with the data.

As I think about this upcoming season, I’ve decided that it’s worth it to try at least one more time to collect some data and see what I can do with it. Given that the logistics of collecting data itself is somewhat difficult while maintaining a decent pace of play, I want to both collect as little data as possible and have the data that I do collect offer the most impact.

What I intend to focus on for this season is collecting data for shots that clearly cost me the most strokes. This would include things like topped/chunked shots, drives that go into the woods, or poor lag putts that lead to unnecessary 3 putts. There will certainly be quite a bit of variability from round to round in terms of the number of shots that I need to catalogue, but it should be a lot easier for me to make note of 15 – 20 shots per round than 80 to 90.

Hopefully, this will result in less, but more actionable data that will let me prioritize my limited practice time. The key will then be to actually put in the targeted practice given all the usually constraints – time, facilities, physical capacity, etc. I’m able to work on ground contact and strike at home, so I’m less limited in that regard. However I need to go to the practice area of the course to really work on face control and distance control, both of which I know are things I need to work on. Hopefully with some actionable data I’ll be able to put in the most impactful kind of work.