The Peterborough Examiner e-edition

Finding your truth in all of the data

PAUL HICKEY OPINION PAUL HICKEY IS A GOLF ENTHUSIAST WHO CAN BE REACHED AT PAUL.HICKEY@OUTPOST379.COM

Fairways hit. Greens in regulation. Sand save percentage. Number of putts.

It would be easy to be tricked into thinking that tracking performance has always been a big part of the game of golf. Truth is, statistics like those ones are of zero help in understanding the parts of your own game where you need the most help.

Take putts. Is 30 putts in a round good or bad? Depends on how long the putts were. Does number of putts measure putting performance or how well you chip?

The thing is, us golfers are terrible at recognizing the underlying truth of our games.

We defy logic at every turn. Some of us like having low handicaps, while others brag about getting tons of shots.

So how could we ever really know the parts of our game where improvement would yield us the biggest drop in our scoring?

Lou Stagner, golf data insights lead at Arccos, and one of the leading data research analysts on the PGA Tour tells the story of instructor Sean Foley working with Justin Rose, during the time when Rose was consistently in the top five in the world rankings. Rose told Foley that they have to start by working on his wedge play because, as Rose described it, “I am a terrible wedge player.”

Foley checked the Tour’s Shotlink stats that showed Rose was actually the No. 2 wedge player on tour at the time. One of the best golfers in the world had no idea how this aspect of his game compared to other tour players.

He was no doubt coloured by a couple of really bad wedge shots in recent rounds that distorted the truth. Imagine if he had spent the following few weeks trying to improve a part of his game that could yield no advantage over his competitors?

Stagner and a few others are golf’s newest and most convincing data disciples, making airtight cases for the power of analytics in improving golf scores.

What’s been missing over the past 500 years of golf is data in sufficient detail, in sufficient quantity, to be able to tell us what is actually happening in our shotmaking.

Arccos manufactures small chips that you plug into the butt end of your golf grips, where the hole is, giving you the power to know exactly how far each and every shot you hit travels, and where it ends up.

That data is fed into a system that now includes more than 600 million shots, across golfers of all shapes, sizes and handicaps.

At a macro level, this means that the Arccos system worldwide can compare where you hit every shot from on every hole and what you scored, with the results of hundreds of millions of other shots played from similar lies and distances.

The most powerful and popular calculation that this size of data set enables is what is called Strokes Gained. It measures how different parts of your game compare to others of similar or different handicaps.

The hardware and software deployed by Arccos and others, including the PGA Tour’s Shotlink, allows pros and amateurs to identify which types of shots and which parts of their games give them advantages or disadvantages compared to the rest of the field, be it Tour Pros or all 10-handicappers.

It has been said you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

News flash. You can measure almost anything in our world these days, with striking accuracy and insight.

Data disciples such as Lou Stagner believe that there has never been a technique, a philosophy, a swing thought or gizmo that is as proven and foolproof a shot saver as big data.

Is it time to put it to work for you?

SPORTS

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2023-06-07T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-07T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thepeterboroughexaminer.pressreader.com/article/281779928521699

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