Did I say that I’d do a monthly update? Well, ahem….I’m back!

There is some value to waiting on stats until after the year ended. We had pretty good weather down the stetch in Indy and I played a fair amount right through the end of December. This allowed me to use The Grint and scrub out my stats for the year. I can tell you a LOT about my game via these stats, but I sincerely doubt that blog would be very fun to read. I do however have some highlights worth noting, and this kind of thinking can inform us all about tracking stats.

A note about tracking: I use the Grint Pro Membership to track my game for every round (right now I track fairways hit, putts, penalty areas; I may add club selection/distance tech this year). I find it pretty damned informative and you will too. My partner here at GolfIndy uses Arccos and that might be something I look into. Anyway you look at it, you can find something to help you see your data.

On to my “highlights.”

An easy one to spot is my average-over-par on the front 9 - I am 9% better on the back side. I am a full shot over-par on Hole 1, both for the year and last 20 rounds. So easy stat-driven change? I need to re-evaluate using the range to warm up. I hardly ever do and have always thought I was loose enough (I played recently, go with warm-up swings, etc). I think that plan is dead; gotta get there early and hit some.

Next up: Scoring avg. by hole par. My par3 stat is 3.7, par4 is 4.9 and par5s is 5.8 (wonder why my handy went up…sigh). There is a glimmer of hope though, as my 10 best improve: par3 - 3.6, par4 - 4.6 and par5 - 5.6. That’s something; more informative though is clearly not taking advantage of par5s. I can occasionally hit them in 2 and almost always have less than a hundred yds if I’m hitting a third. I need to keep it in play and give myself a chance because…

My GiR stats combined are a paltry 29.2% - this goes slightly up on par5s to 35.5%. But I highlight this because my par3 stats show promise: for 150-175yds my GIR is 29.7% (sounds familiar) - but on 125-150yds it goes up a whopping 76% to 52.5% - so this means with a good lie (on a tee or nice level teeing area) my ability to GIR at that shorter approach distance is a scoring opportunity I need to maximize.

You should know I made it a focus of mine late in 2018 that I wanted to pick a better line of the tee for my driver; alongside this I started tracking my “fairways hit” stat as those that caught a first cut (easily playable). I think my tee game is pretty good. Something I did probably mid-year 2019 was to change my approach game; my battery died on my laser so I just stopped using it and instead went with middle off the green numbers. As in: just hit the damn green! As the year went on from there, my stats did improve. This moved all GIR up about 34% - that’s an 18% improvement and clearly something I will keep in my plans. (I do love the laser fyi, great to learn your true distances, and for when you need to measure to something other than the flag.)

Digging into my stats is pretty revealing; if you take a dive in you’ll see some gaps too. My focus for The Par Project is going to about getting off to a good start and hitting greens in regulation. If I can get my average putts to the 28-31 range from there, good scores are a result.