After shooting a 99 from the whites at the River Marsh Golf Club a couple of days ago, writing two posts about the adventure, then starting work on what is to be my first video of a Maryland golf course, I continued to question my choice of hitting a 4-wood off the turf to the 170-yard 17th hole, requiring a carry of 150 to 160 yards to get over Shoal Creek and the marsh just on the other side. And it really isn’t just about my 4-wood carry distance but the carry distance of almost every club in my bag. My Voice Caddie T11 golf watch tells me how far I hit a shot but it only tells me the total distance and those are the numbers that I carry with me on a small card so I can make sure that I select the right club when I’m in doubt. So, to satisfy my curiosity I grabbed my trusty 4-wood and set off to the Severna Park Golf Center and their Top Tracer launch monitors to see what the statistics were for carry and total distance. And I thought, while I’m there, I’ll also bring along my Hack Motion swing aid and work on my correct hand position through the swing and, of course, my swing tempo.
Now you’re probably thinking that working on three things at the same time is probably a recipe for disaster. It’s a lesson I’ve learned before and probably one I’ll have to relearn in the future. You should go to the range and if you’re not just there to pound some balls then you should focus on just one thing to help you improve. It only took about 40 balls to almost completely destroy any confidence I had in my swing. I was scattering balls everywhere. It took the second half to get it back after I quit worrying about the three things I had come to the range to work on and just started hitting balls. Sometimes even one swing thought is one too many. For now, consider it relearned.
The second thing I took away from the second half of the driving range visit? Hitting the 4-wood off the turf at the River Marsh 17th was the right call to get the ball to the front of the green over dry land but it had only a 12.5% chance (based on the Top Tracer carry stats) of making it to dry land on the 17th. That’s seven out of every eight shots lost to the hazard. And yes, my ball was short and never found. According to the stats, If I had teed the ball up, the likelihood of getting to dry land rises to 75% and on average would have made it to the center of the green. Lesson learned. Starting today, I’ll do a better job of collecting the data for each of my clubs and modifying my distance cheat sheet to include that information. The Top Tracer app has a lot of that data, and I’ll be going back to previous sessions to see what insights can be gained.
Let me know if you already do something similar, how you collect it, and how you put it together to make it easy to use while out on the course. And if you use a launch monitor, let me know what one you use and what information you find useful.