Trying to get better at golf this year? Start by doing this simple thing first
ANDY BUCHANAN
Golf Digest senior writer Alex Myers is on a one-year mission to see how good he can get at golf through daily practice and playing. Read more from his “Late Scratch?” series here.
I was thrilled to get the green light to chase shooting red scores, but how was I actually going to go about doing it? I came to the logical conclusion that I first needed to get a proper assessment of my game by tracking my stats. And experts agree.
“The first thing I want to know with a new student, whether they’re a tour player or a 20-handicapper, is where they’re losing strokes,” Golf Digest Legend of Golf Instruction Mike Adams says. “It’s never in the same place from player to player. Are you mis-managing your game? Are you not striking it well? Not short gaming it? Look at your last five rounds and map out what made your scores go higher. How many hazards did you hit in? How many shots did you hit where you didn’t advance the ball into a better place? That’s where you have to start.”
Choose a reliable way to keep your stats
I settled on using Arccos Golf sensors when a co-worker just happened to have a set in his car that he had no intention of using. Sometimes, a plan really just comes together! For those of you not familiar with Arccos, it’s a set of small sensors you twist into the grips of your clubs that pair with an GPS-based app. What this allows you to do is track all of your shots during a round to produce strokes gained stats like you see on the PGA Tour.
You can then see how you stack up (the app lets you toggle if you want to be compared to players of certain handicaps or even tour pros) across the four main categories: driving, approach, short game and putting. So, this is a LOT more detailed than just checking the fairways and greens you hit while noting the number of putts you took on your scorecard. There are other options out there as well like Shot Scope, Game Golf, SwingU, 18Birdies, Golf Pad and The Grint. Some include sensors and others, you have to input more of the information. And, of course, you can track your stats the old fashioned way. If you do that, here are five things we suggest to keep tabs on.
With Arccos, I always seem to need to make corrections after the round based on shots not recording or misinterpreting something like a dropped club or a practice swing, but overall, I really like it. And I’ve learned that it works better if you mark where the pin placements are on each hole. The good thing is you can always adjust stuff after the round, which is especially good if you don’t want to be focused on your phone while playing.
Anyway, the point of this article isn’t to be an Arccos tutorial, but to show how it can be helpful. Obviously, five rounds isn’t a big sample size, but it still taught me a lot. And it armed me with more information for when I had my first lesson with Quaker Ridge head golf professional Mario Guerra, who happens to be an Arccos ambassador himself. Allow me to take you through some personal findings to show what this can do for your game.
Identify your weak spots
The first thing these five rounds showed me is that I have a LOT of work to become a scratch golfer. Obviously, I already knew that by just looking at my scores, but having sophisticated stats makes this gap easier to understand.
As you can see, I averaged losing 5.2 strokes to a 0.0 handicap over those five recorded rounds. Although, to be fair to myself, my career round from September that prompted this project wasn’t on there (Too bad, because I was really cooking that day) and these were more spread-out rounds during the fall as the season wound down. More telling is that about 75 percent of those strokes came from driving (-2.0) and approach (-1.7) play. Right off the bat, that told me I need to spend most of my time working on my full swing. Had it been the other way around, I would have come up with a more short-game-oriented practice plan. Not that my short game is perfect.
I lost another 1.2 shots with my putting while only losing a couple tenths of a stroke on short game (Hey, at least I'm scratch level at something). Again, five rounds is a small sample size, but I found it to be a fair one. And these stats are also partly where I derived my general plan for getting better by a stroke in four different categories that I wrote about in my initial post. My hope is to get longer, which will help gain a stroke in driving, I want to tighten up my misses with my drivers and my irons for another stroke, get a stroke better in putting, and then to shave a final stroke with a better mental game and on-course strategy. That doesn't mean I won't practice chipping at times, but if you're like me and you still have a real job, knowing your stats will help you know where best to spend your limited practice time.
Know where you're missing
Another great thing about Arccos is that you can go much deeper into each of these categories. For instance, this was pretty wild—concerning my increasingly wild driving:
I was only hitting 48 percent of fairways, but I’m significantly worse when I tee it up on straight holes. What I learned from Mario, who wants me to get up to 60 percent fairways or another two hit per round, is that my two-way miss was hurting me even more on these holes. (I’ll get into what we worked on to start fixing that in a later article.) I’ve worked hard on increasing my distance (I’ll get to that as well in a later article) the last couple years, but perhaps, at the expense of some accuracy. You might know errant drives are hurting your scores, but a more detailed look at where they're hurting you can be valuable.
Same for approach shots. The top two things Arccos suggested I work on (Driving accuracy was No. 3) were shots from 150-200 yards and approach shots out of the rough. Like most golfers, there's a point in which I stop feeling as comfortable hitting irons (for me, it's past 7-iron) so I wasn't too surprised about the first point, but specifying shots from the rough was revealing and something I'd never thought about. Although, when you hit as many golf balls off driving range mats as I do, that starts to make more sense. And now I know when I do go to the range, I shouldn't start by just hitting about 50 9-irons because that's a waste of time.
Be real about your carry distances
I also found this chart particularly telling—and it seems to be a common trend among weekend golfers:
What’s that old adage? If you’re between clubs, you should probably club up? Look how often I’m coming up short of the green! And I almost never go long. It’s often better to be short than long, but clearly I could and should be clubbing up more (Golf Digest Top 50 Teacher Tony Ruggiero says most bad golfers overestimate their carry distances) to get more approach shots to the putting green.
Form a game plan
At the end of 2024, I decided to get a standalone putting lesson for the first time and I sought the help of Bill Smittle, a former 30-year head pro at Scarsdale Golf Club. We made sweeping changes in our first session, including getting me to stop sticking out my left elbow. And I know these stats would have been much worse if we hadn’t done that. My focus then was to cut down on short misses and, more importantly, to get better with lag putting because I was starting to hit more greens. And the good news is it looks like that’s paid off big time.
You shouldn't just track your stats to see where you struggle, but also to see where you excel and, obvioiusly, to confirm you're improving. But now, I clearly still need to really work on mid-range putts, especially from 6-9 feet, where I lost nearly a full stroke (-0.9 strokes gained) to a scratch player. Which is perfect because I have a new practice green from PrimePutt in my basement and I’ve been spending just about every free minute I have down there grinding.
OK, to summarize, keeping track of your stats is a simple, yet really important if you want to get better, because how are you really going to know the areas you need to improve most? I now had a better understanding of what I was doing well—and, more importantly—not well. It was time to get to work.