Your scores are high and getting higher, so you’ve finally decided to schedule a series of lessons. And when you connect with ExperienceGolf instructor Stefanie Ferguson at our CommonGround Golf Course, you tell her, “I’m just missing too many tee shots. My putting’s good, 36 putts a round, so I don’t need to work on that.”
Ferguson digs deeper and learns that you’re averaging only two greens in regulation over 18 holes. And while a two-putt plus a fairway and a green equals a par-4, a missed fairway, missed green and two putts can add up to far more.
“If you’re only hitting two greens in regulation, 36 is a high number of putts,” she notes. “If it’s taking you four or five to get to the green and then you’re two-putting, you’re looking at a 6 or a 7. That’s really not that great. That tells us you need to spend some time on your putting.”
In this golf age of too-much-information, where launch monitors can give us our swing speed, ball speed, smash factor, spin and attack angle and too much more, Ferguson and other instructors still treasure the simple things in life. Give them your fairways-greens-putts statistics and they’ll steer you to the proper practice drills. Customize your game-tracking stats and they’ll even be able to help your thinking and attitude.
“More focus and having a good plan is more important than the amount of time you can practice,” Ferguson says. “And that’s where stats can be most helpful.”
If your aspirations are high, such as for ExperienceGolf’s elite juniors or the Metro State University women’s golf team coached by Ferguson, or if you just love gadgetry, systems like the one produced by Arccos will give you deep insight into your golf game without you having to make calculations or even pick up a pencil.
“That’s an app with sensors that go on your club, and it pretty much does all the work for you,” says Ferguson, who uses Arccos to monitor the progress of many students. “It’s all strokes-gained based, so it will point to where you need to spend time, even to the length of putts.”
The Metro State team uses Draw More Circles. Players write down the surface they’re hitting off and the distance they have left to the flag. After the round they input that information for each shot in their phone, and the app compares their stats to their aspirational level.
“They can say, ‘I want to be an LPGA Tour player,’ and it can compare all their stats to that.”
Next time they practice, the app tells them what they should be working on and recommends games to play.
Draw More Circles charges between $29 and $229 per quarter, depending on the features selected, and the Arccos system costs $250 with membership the first year and then $200 a year after that. Garmin has a system like Arccos, Approach, that starts at $80 and syncs with a Garmin watch or app membership, about $100 a year. Ferguson also likes Decade, an app-based system created by Scott Fawcett and endorsed by Bryson DeChambeau, which has two options, $199 a year and $325 a year.
There are several popular free golf tracking apps with upcharges for additional features. Golfshot, SwingU, 18 Birdies and The Grint are among phone add-ons to consider.
But CGA members have free access to the GHIN app, where they can track statistics as they input their scores. Fairway? Check, or choose the arrow corresponding to missed left or right or short or long. GIR? Check, or choose the arrow describing the miss. And, how many putts? Transfer all this to a spreadsheet afterward and watch the trends.
Many players prefer to track their game with a pencil, even as they’re writing down their scores. The basics: a dot in one corner for a fairway, a dot in the next corner for green (or, on a par-5, a second fairway shot) and a small number next to the big-number hole score for putts.
“But how does that help the players who physically can’t get to the green in regulation?” says Ferguson, thinking about seniors, juniors and short hitters. “One gal I know of looks at the holes where she gets strokes and adds those to get to that green. That makes it much more obtainable, so it’s a cool way to think about that.”
BlueGolf.com offers an elegant option for simple tracking, but you have to think ahead. Visit the site before your round and print out a scorecard like this one:
I found a much more elaborate system in one of the instruction books in my library, Golf Magazine’s “The Best Short Game Instruction Guide Ever!” published in 2010. Longtime Oregon instructor Jerry Mowlds labeled the columns on his scorecard “Putts, 1st shot, 2nd shot, 3rd shot, 4th shot.” For each shot he noted which club he used and rated his contact on a scale of 1 to 3. A tiny x indicated fairway or green was found; a tiny o indicated the fairway or green was missed and an arrow points to where it was missed. Next to number of putts he estimated the distance of the first putt atop the distance of the second. (See the sample I drafted using the rows on a CommonGround scorecard.)
Referring back to our initial 36-putt example, Mowlds would suggest looking at the holes where you did not make the green in regulation and checking the distance of your first putt. If more than 20 feet, he’d suggest working on your chipping, If your second number is higher than 4, work on your putting too!
The variations on the old fairways-greens-putts formula aren’t limited, however, to what fits on the scorecard you’re using. I found printable track sheets online, at ChartMyGolf.com and, so detailed it looks like a Colorado election ballot, GolfStatsCoach.com.
“I think for your typical golfer, that’s going to be way too much,” says Ferguson. “Something kind of similar, but maybe not quite as intense, is called Journal 18, an actual book. It keeps popping up on my Instagram lately.”
Journal18 offers three elegant options for back-pocket game tracking, including one with erasable pages.
Another book in my golf library, “Mastering Golf’s Mental Game,” by Dr. Michael T. Lardon, teaches a pyramid pre-shot routine that starts with calculations in the left brain, moves to visualization with the right brain and concludes with execution by instinct and what he calls the “know mind.” He created a simple mental scorecard system where at the end of a hole the player writes down the number of shots where he executed the routine (Q) and the number of shots taken (R). At the end of the round, the ration of Q/R produces the mental score.
The scoresheet at AdamYoungGolf.com includes a section on mental faults, so for each hole we can tally the times we made mistakes including miscalculation, fear, lack of commitment, distraction, club selection and more.
Ferguson recommends self-ratings in the mental category, perhaps tied in with the “Vision 54” goals set out in Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott’s “Every Shot Must Have a Purpose.” For this you’d make note of whether you remained objective/neutral and positive/happy after each shot.
Or you could create your own system for rating your enjoyment on the course. Smiley face, pensive face, frowny face?
“I think that’s a great thing to pay attention to, and it doesn’t get tracked as often as it should,” Ferguson says. “Even keeping an eye on overall enjoyment makes a big difference. Could you stay happy during the round? Give that a rating. Something that gets the mind off the technical stuff sometimes could be really helpful.”