For the longest time, I felt that tracking shots didn’t mean anything. I knew what I hit all of my clubs and thought that was enough for me to build out better scores, but let me tell you, it is not.
Several metrics calculated by apps are beneficial but often forgotten with manual scorekeeping. Distance is one thing, but what is the most used club in your bag? Is that club missing consistently to the left or to the right? Or how often does that club find the fairway or green? Sure, you may be able to recognize this in real-time, but are you able to retain that information and use it in the future?
I know many of these questions are rhetorical, but I am sure you can understand why. Shot tracking can massively adjust your score simply by giving you a more logical approach to a primarily feel-driven game.
For myself, I use GolfPad GPS. GolfPad was the first app I tried and does everything I need, and the price is right, sitting at a whopping $19.99 a year. When I started, I only used this app to track my score and paid no attention to any of the additional features it offered. It was free, and I could see strokes and putts at a glance. I did this for a fair amount of time before I started tracking my shots individually, and man, was it eye-opening.
Seeing how I made my way to the green on each hole was the first thing I loved about shot tracking. On the course, it is tough to visualize all the shots on the hole after round, let alone once you have wrapped a session at hole 19. Going back and looking at where my tee shot ended, where my second shot ended, and what my approach looked like allowed me to gain a tremendous amount of information about my game directly.
With this visualization method in mind, I started connecting the dots easier and easier each time I played. Having more accurate readings on club distances and using the GPS to create the path with each shot gave me a great advantage when planning my approach. As you can see in the screenshot below, I could attack this Par 5 a little more aggression than I had in the past because I knew what I wanted the path to be.
I almost missed this target as the wind was to my back, and the ball had a good bounce when it hit. My approach was simple: Leave the ball in the ball in the fairway off the tee, so I had a good lie for my second shot. Then create a second shot that lands short of the bunker, take it out of play, and make sure I missed to the right to ensure I had a lot of green to chip or pitch. I hit the ball a little fat because of the planning prior; I still had a good look at the green. As you can see, following my pitch, I went on to 3 put the green. However, I had never played this course in my defense, and the greens were lightning fast. I was utterly unprepared, and on hole one, I smacked it around a bit.
The second set of metrics that I follow closely is where my ball ends most of the time. I have discussed this directly in a previous article titled Breaking 100: 5 Key Habits, as it is crucial to the “results-minded” golfer. Using GolfPad, I can select any club in my bag, view its accuracy off the tee, and its approach to the green where applicable. The more I track my shot, the more accurate this information becomes. It allows me to build out game plans based on tendencies and insights overlooked in the past.
The chart above shows a recent round that recorded where I wanted to track my new Nike 3wood. As you can see, my shots tend to leak right with my 3wood, although my distances are reasonably consistent. The information from this single round allows me to note that I hit this club better off the fairway than I do off the tee box. While this may be a mental block more than an ability issue, I know this heading into my next round and can take this information to the range with a mission.
Of course, there are many more features that I look at throughout the app, but these are the main two I believe provide additional feedback that could be tough to track manually. Things like Putts and GIR are tracked easily on the old-school pencil and card, so I chose not to focus on them as a significant advantage to having an app.
When it is all said and done, I directly believe that there is a considerable advantage to tracking each shot you take while on the course. My thought processes have changed around the clubs that I am using, and with each round played, I gain more and more perspective about my game. I am not here to endorse anything or to suggest a specific app. Use whatever app you like that fits the bill for you and provides the information you need to better your game. However, I suggest that you start using an app or watch to track shots and other data when you play.
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