A recent lunch with good friend and professional golfer, Tim Schaetzel, led to an interesting discussion about how a typical player analyzes their game. After going back and forth on different ways the game is evaluated for improvement, we concluded that most players rarely use a valuable tool available to them: statistical analysis.
Courtesy of Rob Matre
Before we get in the details, I’ll preface the post with Tim’s background. We grew up playing high school golf in Atlanta before his days at the University of Michigan where he studied Industrial and Operations Engineering. I visited him one weekend which included inferior quality Big Ten football and some challenging classes I sat in on. Tim’s studies fit perfectly with his analytical mind and even better for the conversation had over lunch.
The last few years in academia have produced research in our sport unlike before from relatively new statistics that give the top pros invaluable new ways to analyze their games and identify areas for improvement.
Over lunch, we hypothesized that if the average golfer analyzed his/her game from a statistical point of view versus other methods, they would learn beneficial insights and significantly improve their scores. These insights would help them prioritize their time and resources to the identified areas of weakness.
Thinking about the usual habits of our fellow golfers, most players come in after the round, grab a drink, talk about their best shots; maybe shoot the breeze about their latest swing thought or tip. If there was as much input post-golf round as there currently is pre-golf round, how much more quickly and effectively could one improve?
With our hypothesis drawn and many more questions to be asked, we’re going to do a 5-6 series post titled “Priority Golf” and hopefully prove our hypothesis by analyzing the numbers and bringing them to you in an easily digestible format.
We look forward to uncovering insight to better your game.
In between posts, I’ll still be uncovering golf’s stories and reflecting on the state of the game. Here’s to a better understanding of the game, more insight to the metrics of golf, and lower scores.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting hypothesis, I’m a big of analytical thinking like this so it should be fun to see what changes. Good luck with it all.
Only stat that I really look at is my putts as it is a thing I can try to improve, stats like fairways hit are pretty useless to the average golfer.
We are trying to hit the fairway but the ball does not always go where we want unlike the scratch or single figure handicapper. I suppose noting down if the ball went left or right could be of use.
Amateur golf – gotta say you are wrong on this. The stat will back you up. If you are consistently missing fairways to one side ie you have a hook or slice, your pro can soon put you right in a lesson. It will be up to you then. So percentages of fairways hit is a big thing to monitor. As you get better the % will go up. It’s a similar thing in greens in regulation. No of putts directly correlate to how many green you hit/miss. If you only hit 20% of greens, chances are you are greenside and leaving a chip andf putt. If you hit greens you may well two and three putt more. I know this to be true as GIR I average 2.1 and missed greens I average 1.7.