A Different Approach To Stat Tracking

The typical approach to stat tracking is to identify your fairways hit, greens in regulation, and your putts. I believe this is a great way to identify your strengths and weaknesses and see where you need to improve. However, this method does not tell the entire story of a round. Let me explain.

Let’s say you have a dogleg right, with a green shaped on a 45 degree angle to the right (imagine an oval tilted to the right). For this hole, you would want to hit the ball on the left side of the fairway to give yourself the best angle of attack into the green. A shot that lands on the right side leaves an approach over a bunker to a narrow green.

If you are tracking stats, you may hit the right side of the fairway and write down in your stats that you hit a fairway on that hole. However, by being on the right side of the fairway, you have left yourself an extremely difficult approach that is likely to miss the green. The proper play on this hole would be to hit the left side of the fairway, or even be in the left rough. The left rough would give you a better angle and a higher success rate of hitting the green, than hitting the right side of the fairway.

So here is a new way to track things. Write down if you hit the ball to the proper side of the hole or fairway. In the above scenario, a tee shot to the left side is a check mark and the right side is a miss. If you have a front pin and you miss short, that is a miss. If you hit it past the pin, it’s a check. When you are chipping, did you leave yourself an uphill putt or a downhill putt? The uphill putt is a check, the downhill putt is a miss. What this does is it makes you think about playing holes from the green to the tee. Try to have fewer “misses” and see your scores drop immediately.