Vol. 1 - Hit More Greens

This week we are taking a look at how you can hit more greens just by understanding your own game better which will lead to better club selection. The art of selecting the right club comes down to a couple key areas which I have learned from my own game and studying the games of my players. 

1. Understanding the dispersion of your clubs and finding tendencies

2. Where to aim and how far to play the shot

First let's understand what dispersion is and how this can help us. When we hit one of our clubs, let's say a 7 iron, it will create this shotgun spread. As much as we would like to think of our shots as sniper rifles hitting the same spot over and over they are undoubtedly more like a shotgun pattern. This means we will have golf balls come up short, long, too far right and too far left of our target. See image below:

As we see from the above image our shots will create this pattern that we can understand to make better decisions on the course. For this pattern we see that from front to back the difference is 12 yards and from side to side is 28 yards. Most of your average tour greens are going to be around 20 yards wide. This is how we need to start thinking of our clubs to make better decisions. Instead of saying my 7 iron is my 170 club we need to think of a range, 164 - 176 club with a side to side of 28 yards. The reason for this is we will find ourselves in a situation where we need to clear a bunker or water that may be at 165 with a pin at 172. Just like in the image below where if I am a little off with my alignment or strike I can very easily end up in the bunker even though the pin is at 172 which is in my range. 

Most players in this situation will naturally go grab their 170 club because that's how far the hole is. But we have to remember that some of our shots will come up short and in the bunker or water. Instead if we understood our shot dispersion we would know that grabbing the 6 iron would be the best club as it would strongly decrease our chances of ending up in trouble. This is because most players come up short on their approach shots as seen in arccos data from a couple of my students below.

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We see that the tendency is to come up short and this is true for the vast majority of players. This means that players should club up. I would rather have a player hit a ball to the back of the green then come up short of the green. This is because statistically you are better off putting than chipping even if the chip is closer to the hole. Now let’s say a player's tendency isn’t to miss short but left or right we can use this to make better decisions in regards to targets and our alignment. This brings us to our second key which is understanding where to aim.

From the earlier shot dispersion diagram we noticed that I had a 28 yard wide window for my 7 iron and most of the average tour greens will be around 20 yards wide. This means that if a flag is either to the right or left half of the green and I aim at the flag that I am setting myself up to miss half of my shots or more off of the green. This doesn’t even take into account any course conditions that could make the shot more difficult such as lie, wind or even pressure of the shot. But if I were to aim at the middle of the green regardless of where the pin is at I know that from my dispersion pattern that the majority of my shots will land on the green which will save you shots. 

Now here is what you can do to get started.

1. Go into your local indoor facility and find out your shot dispersions with each club. I don’t recommend doing this for your whole bag in 1 session as that would be a lot. Split your bag up into 2 or 3 sections and do each section separately. For the number of shots with each club I would recommend at least 15 shots. Also I would do this several times for each section of your bag to get a good baseline. Lastly, checking these dispersions multiple times a year would be a good habit to get into. 

2. Get a golf data tracking service. There are many great ones out there so make sure to find one you like. I have several players who use Arccos. Personally as a coach I would prefer Arccos due to its coach dashboard where I can easily see all my players' rounds and stats. 

3. Get in the habit of finding the distance to the middle of the green then adding 5 yards - 10 yards to select your club. 

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