There seem to be plenty of ways to “figure out” how far you hit each of the clubs in your bag. The simplest way for me would be to just use my Voice Caddie watch to tell me what to hit. Each time I hit a shot I can enter what club I used and after it collects enough data it will indicate I need to use the 6-iron on your next shot to the green. Seems easy and generally speaking it is. But it doesn’t give me an option for half and three-quarter shots with wedges or really help me with carry distances (except for the wedges where the carry distance and total distance are virtually the same). It also will include in those averages the shots where you hit six inches behind the ball or off the hosel. So if you want to know more about your club distances and are a spreadsheet geek, you might want to start collecting data and put together some formulas.
After I started playing again, the first thing I noticed was that my ball striking was not nearly as good as it was ten years ago, both in distance and consistency. My first reaction was to go to the driving range and start improving. Using the Top Tracer data, I started to compare my performance from one range session to another and finally started to aggregate the data and including shot data from actual rounds as collected by my golf watch.
So I put together a large Excel spreadsheet with distances marked across the top in five yard increments, and down the left side I put my clubs and shot characteristics, i.e. – carry distance of a 9-iron off grass would be “9i C grass.” Then each time I hit that shot I record the distance in the spreadsheet. Each line is then color coded to highlight the highest number of shots in green and the lowest in red.
Along the right side of the spreadsheet, I created formulas to calculate my actual yardages for each line, leaving out the top 10% and lowest 20% to get a “most likely outcome” for each club. So after 107 shots with my pitching wedge, the match suggests that I can carry a hazard that’s 92 yards away 80% of the time with that club, that my average carry is 104 yards and my average total distance is 106 yards.
When I play a round, I print out a strip from the right side and keep it in my pocket for those critical moments when I’m not sure which club I should use for a particular shot. It give me a lot more confidence when I’m hitting it.
Any other spreadsheet geeks out there?
