Golf Stats
By Nick
There is an interesting saying from Business Management guru Peter Drucker – ‘You can only manage what you measure’.
Now taking this saying into your golf game, how can you improve when you don’t measure any golf stats. Sure you keep track of your score and handicap, but in a business that is as general as revenue and profit. If you actually wanted to improve your businesses revenue and profit you would need to dig deeper into the numbers and you can only do that if you historically have measured certain key points. The same with your golf game, if you want to be getting your handicap down just looking at your score won’t help you. You need to be able to dig deeper into your golf stats to see what you are good at, and what needs to be improved. But how deep to go? If you are trying to record every little detail then you’ll actually be distracted from playing golf – which is the last thing we want to try to achieve. So here is my take on what golf stats are important and what we will be building into 3 Good Shots:
1, Distance for each club.
I consider this the most important of the golf stats to keep, and perhaps not what you’d have expected to be first. This is something you can do once a year, and then just refer to your numbers for the season. Most golfers think they know how far they hit each club – but it is usually a guess. And whenever a guess is involved it throws uncertainty into the mix, and any uncertainty can lead to nervous golf swings.
I’ve written before about the process I went through about getting distance measured so I won’t go into too much detail this time. Suffice to say, if you can get your yardages measured by some kind of radar device then do it as it’s the most accurate way of doing it. You’ll be able to get the difference between the carry and actual distance, as the carry is probably the most important number here.
Alternatively you’ll need to spend a little while out on the course hitting golf balls and pacing them out. This works of course, but it will be harder for you to work out the carry of each club as you won’t necessarily know where each ball pitched on its first bounce. Still, better than nothing and certainly better than guessing.
2, Scrambles
No matter what level of golf you play, this golf stat is important. Your ability to get up and down is the critical factor between winning and losing a competition whether you are playing in your monthly medal at your local club or the British Open. It was during a Jamie Edwards seminar that he made the point that the higher level you get to in golf, the more important your short game gets. I didn’t think this made much sense as surely better golfers spend more time hitting greens in regulation, but bear with me.
- Most professional golf competitions are won by one or two shots
- In most professional golf competitions it is not unusual to see the leaders hitting 14 or 15 greens in regulation. That leaves four or five holes where they don’t hit the green and need to try to get up and down. This can easily be the difference between 2 or 3 shots, and as most golf competitions are won by one or two shots it is the difference between winning and second or third place.
- Quite often the winners of pro golf competitions aren’t the golfers with the best fairways and green stats, but the best scrambling and putting stats.
So obviously having a killer short game is important to the pro’s, but when you are an 18 handicapper and only hitting 3 or 4 greens in regulation in a normal round your short game becomes even more important.
By keeping track of your scrambling percentage you can see if this is something you need to work on. Par18 is a great game for doing this and your Par18 scores is something you can keep track of on www.3goodshots.com. From doing lots of Par18 you can be standing over a chip and say to yourself, “the odds are I’m going to get up and down from this chip” which is an amazing confidence booster. Also when you are in the middle of the fairway and hitting into the green, if you know that a miss still probably means an up and down par, you’ll be firing at the flag with a lot more confidence.
3, Fairways in Regulation
“Driving for show, putting for dough” is the old saying, but if your drives are always putting you in trouble or making you play three off the tee it is something that you should be looking at. I’m actually fairly flexible in what I class as a fairway when keeping this stat. If I hit a drive that lands in the light rough but still allows me to hit a green in regulation then I class it as a fairway in regulation. When looking back at my stats I want to see if my driving has cost me shots or not. As I get better I might get a bit more strict with this.
When I do hit a bad drive I usually make a note as to whether it went left or right by marking a left or right arrow. This helps in two ways; Firstly if I notice a patterns after a few holes I can consider what to do about it. I know my golf game and swing quite well so if my first few drives have been blocks to the right I know what might be the problem. Secondly, again related to the arrows, if a lot of my drives have been a bit hook’y, I know what to work on when I get to the driving range next time.
4, Greens In Regulation (GIR)
This one had to appear somewhere in the golf stats. How many greens in regulation you can hit does depend on how good your driving is each day. If you are hitting a lot of bad drives then it is going to be very tough to have a good GIR number. I use the format of
- Tick – green hit
- Cross – couldn’t actually go for green in reg, generally means because of a bad drive
- Arrows – if I don’t hit the green in regulation I use up, down, left and right arrows to indicate how it was missed in relation to the green.
As with the driving, I find the arrows important to consider how I’m playing the round, as well as what to concentrate on next time I’m at the driving range or what to report my issues are next time I’m having a lesson.
5, Number of putts
I’ve placed this as the fifth most important golf stat to keep track of. Putting is obviously hugely important, but the number of putts you have hugely depends on how good your scrambling is and how many greens in regulation you hit. A more important number is putts per green in regulation, which certainly wants to be below 2 – and if not you are three putting more often than you should so practice it. The good news is that www.3goodshots.com will calculate your putts per green in regulation for you automatically when you enter your rounds full details.
So what stats do you keep track of when playing?
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