Hey everyone, I just started playing last year & wonder what would be the best stats to start tracking with the hopes of improving my game... any feedback would be appreciated.

[quote="slimpks1850"]Hey everyone, I just started playing last year & wonder what would be the best stats to start tracking with the hopes of improving my game... any feedback would be appreciated.[/quot

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Fairways hit,penalty shots and putts

Interesting... what I've been tracking is fairways hit, greens hit ( which is usually not that many ), & putts. Maybe I'll just add in penalty shots. Thanks.

I'd add in sand shots, too.

I'ld suggest: tee-off club, fairways hit (left, right, miss, hit), sandshots, chips, putts. Perhaps distance of first putt, penalty shots. And gross score ofcourse.

This willshow you how you do on long clubs (do you need that driver?) and get data on the quality of your approaches.

Oob has taught me the value of the GIR+1. I think it is a pretty telling stat.

legitimatebeef wrote:

Oob has taught me the value of the GIR+1. I think it is a pretty telling stat.

Agreed. I think that this is the most important stat to track until a person gets to the point where he expects a couple of birdies a round. Why? Because it tells us how many times we put ourselves into a position to get par. In my world, bogeys aren't bad. And a two-putt for bogey is a typical outcome for most holes. So GIR+1 is preferrable to GIR for me.

Agree with Beef and Bryan above. GIR+1 is a great stat to track until you get down to a mid handicapper. Once you are getting 60-70 percent regularly, then add GIR to the mix.

Also, at this stage of your ability, Fairways hit is NOT as important as Playable Drive. Hitting a good drive that goes a little off the fairway, but that still gives you a fairly reasonable opportunity to get to the green in regulation, means you had a good drive...or at least acceptable. Nothing to hang your head at, so to speak. At the end of the round, to look back and see that you had 80% playable drives is a positive message for your game. If you missed most fairways by a couple yards and looked back and saw a stat for Fairways Hit as 12%, I don't think it would be as inspirational.

Putts is also very helpful to track. You can learn a lot from this. When you have less than 30 putts per round, you probably had a decent round. You certainly saved some strokes.

DougE wrote:

Hitting a good drive that goes a little off the fairway, but that still gives you a fairly reasonable opportunity to get to the green in regulation, means you had a good drive...or at least acceptable.

Yes and no. The fairway is where you try to hit it, everything that doesn't hit the fairway but still is playable is luck. Also "playable" on one course may be "absolutely unplayable" on another or at another time. "Playable drives" doesn't tell you how well you do on the drives unless you also keep "fairways hit" stats. It's like a shooting game where you also keep track of scores that "just" missed the target.

Whether or not it is a "positive message" is not within the goal of keeping statistics as far as I'm concerned. Statistics aren't there to make you happy, they are a means to check progress and determine skills to work on.

jev wrote:

DougE wrote: Hitting a good drive that goes a little off the fairway, but that still gives you a fairly reasonable opportunity to get to the green in regulation, means you had a good drive...or at least acceptable. Yes and no. The fairway is where you try to hit it, everything that doesn't hit the fairway but still is playable is luck. Also "playable" on one course may be "absolutely unplayable" on another or at another time. "Playable drives" doesn't tell you how well you do on the drives unless you also keep "fairways hit" stats. It's like a shooting game where you also keep track of scores that "just" missed the target. Whether or not it is a "positive message" is not within the goal of keeping statistics as far as I'm concerned. Statistics aren't there to make you happy, they are a means to check progress and determine skills to work on.

Sorry Jev, but respectfully disagree. If you hit a shot perfectly down the center of the fairway and it trickles slightly off, how can you say that wasn't a good drive? Yes, it did not end up in the fairway, but it still shows you that you hit a good drive. For a novice, it means a lot. The idea is to encourage, not penalize. Personally, I use both stats, but I hit a lot of fairways. I also make par from many good drives that do not hit fairways. Yesterday I hit one in a lateral hazard. I took a penalty drop/stroke from the proper location, hit my next shot to 10 feet and made the putt for a par. In my stats, even though I made par, I did not say I hit a playable drive. The playable drive stat is meant to mean one in which you have a very reasonable chance to still make par. If you hit a drive into very deep rough and still have 225 yards to the pin on a par 4, just because you can find it and get a club on it, doesn't mean it is a "playable" drive. Realistically, unless you are Tiger, it is unlikely (but not impossible) you'll be able to save par from that situation.

I'd be curious to hear what others feel. Everything is not always black and white.

Interestingly, I don't track playable drives or fairways hit. I've found that the only two types of shots I can't recover from off of the tee are either the stroke and distance penalty or the shot where you have to take two strokes just to get out of jail.

That said, I would rate the "playable drive" stat as a drive where you still had a reasonable chance to make birdie whether you hit the fairway or not. It's still subjective, though. I hit a drive on Saturday that trickled into a red staked area on a par 5. I hit my second shot pin high on the left side of the green from about 220 out, and then just missed my chip shot about a foot to the left of the hole as it curled around the high side of the pin. That left me with a tap in par from less than a foot, but I think I still had a reasonable chance at birdie on that hole even though I hit it into a hazard on my drive. I've also birdied one of the holes at one of my regular courses after hitting a fairway bunker on my drive several times over the past few years.

I keep the "playable drive"stat and view it this way:If I can reach the green on a par 4 from the drive it is playable even if I have to hit 3wood.On a par 5 I consider the drive playable if I can advance the ball to a point where I can reach in 3.

If the drive has to be punched out or is behind a tree or something it is unplayable.

I agree that playable drive is a good stat to track as it does a good job of capturing pretty decent drives that aren't too far off the fairway, and can be significantly better than your actual FW%.

As noted in the oob definition, it's when you have an unimpeded shot to the green with a club that gives you enough distance to get there. Maybe at some courses with very penal rough, less shots off fairway would qualify as 'playable drives'. In my case, playing mostly So Cal munis, the majority of the rough is cut pretty low and hardly a significant difference in lie, it's only trees and shrubs that come into play, but then only mostly when your drives were well off line, hence the value of the stat... I'm getting rambly, but essentially it's a better measurement of 'good' drives vs 'bad' for the majority of amateur golfers.

I guess if I was to use the stat, I would use it to record drives where I hit the ball extremely well...i.e. exactly how I wanted it to be hit. We all know that bad luck creeps into this game from time to time, and I think that the best stat for keeping track of drives is simply an honest stat where you look at the drive and say "that's pretty damn close to being exactly what I wanted to do".

DougE wrote:

Sorry Jev, but respectfully disagree.

No worries... just a difference of opinion I guess.

Quote:

If you hit a shot perfectly down the center of the fairway and it trickles slightly off, how can you say that wasn't a good drive? Yes, it did not end up in the fairway, but it still shows you that you hit a good drive. For a novice, it means a lot. The idea is to encourage, not penalize.

A ball that slightly trickles off is offset by the goldie bounce.

In darts, if you hit '1', your score is "1", not "almost 20". In tennis, if your ball is out but nearly touches the line, it is out. In golf, if your ball touches the water hazard, it is in the hazard. A "playable drive" that is not in the fairway is just luck. Maybe it's playable because the fescue has just been clipped, but the next time you get there it may be knee-high.

Maybe count "hit the fairway", and not "as it lies" for all those that aren't interested in the cold facts but need encouragement from statistics? Even a beginner should recognize that he improves when he hits 3 fairways instead of just 1 as he did last couple of rounds. Not "hey, I must be pretty good because I *almost* hit 14 fairways!".

In the end, it doesn't matter what we think. Track'm both if you like. Statistics are just for your own good, nobody receives points for great statistics.