By Julliana Bravo
Ami Gianchandani was not planning on taking a gap year let alone creating an app, but then fate intervened in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Up until then, she was having a great year on the Yale women’s golf team. In her freshman year, she was named Ivy Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year. In her sophomore year, she set a new scoring record with a 65 in the second round of the Yale Women’s Fall Intercollegiate.
But when COVID hit, the golf season, and the world, were put on hold. All tournaments and events were canceled indefinitely. Lucky for Gianchandani, she did not have to put the two things she was passionate about on hold. Like many great ideas, it starts with a problem to solve.
The first time she played a round of college golf, her coach told her to keep track of her stats. But it was a real chore, taking 45 minutes to input the information into a database. She had better things to do, like hanging out with friends or getting a start on homework, so she came up with a better way. She presented the first sketches of the app that would be known as Accel Golf to her friend and computer whiz, Alex Strasser, in December 2020.
Despite the initial excitement for the app, the more they worked on the product, the more challenges they faced. One of the first and biggest challenges was one of the app’s most important features – the ability to use computer vision to scan the stat card players use during a round. After 20 different versions, they had a result that could maybe work – maybe.
Gianchandani compares these struggles with the struggles of golf. “As soon as you have something figured out,” she says, “you realize it’s not going to work and you have to figure something else out.”
Alongside the creation of the app, she had a part-time internship as a software engineer at Swoop Search. Her days consisted of: golf in the mornings, interning in the afternoons, and then app work well into the evening.
After working through the winter and into the spring, they launched the product in the Apple Store in the summer of 2021. Since then, there have been a few updates based on user feedback.
Gianchandani graduated from Yale in 2023 with a degree in statistics and data science and that fall, she and Strasser, Accel Golf’s cofounder, partnered with the USGA to provide statistics to the new U.S. National Development Program. More recently, they partnered with the American Junior Golf Association.
The app is a perfect mixture of Gianchandani’s love for golf and statistics. “I’m thinking about golf or statistics 90% of the time,” she says, joking that if she did not have golf or her business, she is not sure what she’d do with herself.
Golf keeps her in check with work and work keeps her in check with her golf career, which includes finishing fourth in the 2024 Women’s Met Amateur. It’s a symbiotic relationship that needs the two to thrive.