Tracking

If you are trying to develop skill, or change habits, tracking is one of the most powerful things you can do. Depending on the goal, just by tracking, without any other conscious change, we start changing towards our goal. This is called measurement reactivity. While you can’t just log ‘zero rounds played this week’ and expect to get better, tracking does help with active skill development as well.

By tracking an activity you are reinforcing your accountability. By having a logged history you are able to see patterns/trends and better stay motivated.

Most importantly, it helps you identify your weaknesses. Having an off day is not a pattern. But seeing what your tendencies are over time helps you find common root causes.

Everyone has a different approach, and tolerance, for tracking. Some manually log every shot they make and others track just their handicap index. Somewhere in the middle, we have a set of data points that help determine our strengths and weaknesses, figure out what to practice, and check if practice is improving our game.

Where to Start

Start at the end. What are you trying to achieve? Do you have a goal or an aspect of the game that you want to get better at? What would be an indicator of progress?

If you are not actually recording anything about your game, just keeping track of your score is a decent start. Pick something you want to improve or a weakness (three-putting, double-chipping, approach accuracy) and start to log something that measures the good or bad outcome. Make it lightweight and a part of your normal scoring process. Bonus points for a post-round review that may lead to tracking a metric or two.

Step into tracking rather than trying to capture everything from the start. Unless it is automated, or you have an analytical personality that habitually benefits from tracking, you want to make it an easy habit to adopt. Remember that the point of tracking is not to have perfect optics on the evolution of your game. The point of tracking is to ensure that you are making progress towards achieving your goals.

KPIs, Metrics, and Stats, Oh My

Whatever our goal is, there is something that we can measure it against. As we progress toward our goal, we may also modify what we are tracking. While we don’t have to be good at math to successfully track, we should have an idea of major concepts related to tracking goals.

When tracking, we may use qualitative and quantitative measures. Qualitative measures are not directly numeric values and are typically experiential or subjective, ‘stuck to my pre-shot routine.’ Quantitative measures are directly measurable as numeric or percentage values.

Each time we record a data point, or statistic, we have a measurement. Measurements over time represent metrics. Metrics are often expressed as a percentage, percentage of change, direction/trend, minimum value, or maximum value. Important metrics, tied to a goal, are key performance indicators (KPIs).

It is possible for measurements to start off as qualitative and be refined into quantitative. For instance, we may start off with ‘playable drive’ to work on getting off the tee consistently in play, without penalty. As we get better, maybe we want to improve our accuracy, so we start tracking left/hit/right for ‘result relative to target.’ The final iteration becomes ‘fairway hit.’

With golf, there are already so many common metrics and we can generally measure against a shot’s result. While these don’t capture the mental side, they do provide a great starting point for figuring out what to track. Even better, we can automate a lot of this tracking with shot tracking systems.

Shot Tracking Systems

Shot tracking systems are the easiest way to get data about your game. Regardless of your budget, there are options.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of Arccos. Shot tracking is automatic and the data is fantastic. What you get out of it is worth a lesson or two and I think that offsets the annual cost.

Shot Scope has a mix of automatic and manual (tap club to device) tracking options and there’s no annual/monthly fee. The app also has flexibility with what tracked metrics/data points to visualize.

Free/freemium apps, like 18Birdies and TheGrint, do shot tracking using your phone’s GPS and manual shot/club tagging.

Even if these systems do not provide an ideal look into your game, or track the metrics you are looking for, they provide a fantastic low effort way to get baseline metrics about your clubs and game.

Unstructured Tracking

Journaling, practice notes, text exchanges with your coach–all of these are an opportunity to take unstructured data and analyze it using AI.

Summary

Change takes time. While we tend to put our most recent rounds in the foreground and assume they represent where our game is at, the truth is that your swing and your mind don’t change overnight. Play around with tracking and see what resolution of data works best for you.

What you track should change over time. There may be some data points that are nice to track long term. The long term is why shot tracking systems and automated tracking are excellent choices. What we track should represent what we are working on. This means we should have a combination of shorter term metrics, for supporting goals, and long term metrics, for major goals and as a general progress barometer.

Remember that tracking takes time too–you need more than a couple dozen measurements (or samples) before you start to see meaningful patterns.