I’ve now played five rounds of golf with the new Arccos Air and Arccos Smart Laser in conjunction with the updated app features, and I’ve definitely learned some things about my game. I’m going to use this as a monthly update blog to keep not only myself in check on my performance and things I may need to change in my game or gear, but also so you can read along and learn yourself. Let’s get to it.
What the data is telling me
As Arccos would have it, I need work between the tee box and green. I have it set to compare myself to a scratch golfer, and at the moment I’m losing over 4 strokes. Off the tee I’m seeing semi-decent performance (more on this later), and on the greens I’m losing less than a stroke. The bigger problems are on the approach and in my short game. If I’m being honest about the approach shots, they are mostly coming from bad tee performance, but there’s no real excuse for some of the short-game stats.
Missing greens from less than 25 yards is unacceptable. I’d love to blame my gear, but not in this case. I’m also missing too many greens from 100 to 150 yards, which to me might say a lot about shot selection since those are distances I go after with my wedges, not any irons. I have a tendency to try and get a little bit too cute with anything 150 yards and in, and I think this is a great way of realizing that I need to be more aggressive with my distance choices and club selection and less focused on “creating a shot,” which is usually what ends up getting me in trouble.
The driver quandary
If you look at the data, Arccos isn’t that upset with my driver performance on the surface, but there’s a level to the data that can’t be seen. I’m making up for it because of how far I can hit my driver. It’s actually offsetting the penalties that I take with the driver off the tee, but to me it’s unacceptable to hit anything out of bounds.
It starts to show a more clear picture when I look not just at my driving stats, but my specific stats with the driver itself — going from gaining .8 strokes to losing .8 strokes; only hitting 43% of fairways and the dreaded two-way miss. That also hurts the confidence — I don’t really know where the ball is going to go. At the very least it would be nice to have a one-way miss. So far this season, stepping on the tee box with a driver has been a pretty bad feeling. Hopefully that changes soon with a new driver in my hands.
What I’m working on this month
First and foremost, the number of missed greens from less than 25 yards needs to be zero. There’s absolutely no excuse for that. That will be a big stat I look at for the next update. I am also going to abandon the driver. I’ve been using one that gives me the most ball speed, and that’s still true, but it just doesn’t work for my game. Even after lofting up and adding weight to the crown of the driver, I just can’t seem to get the driver to create the amount of spin I am comfortable with. So I’ll have to sacrifice some ball speed, but I’d rather lose yardage and figure this out.
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The positives from this month? So far I feel very comfortable with everything between my driver and my wedges, which shows in the data. My irons are really great, and I have more confidence in my G440 4-hybrid and my Qi4D 5-wood than almost any other club in the bag. Being able to feel free going into par-5s or off the tee on short par-4s has been a big boost.
I’ve got plenty of golf lined up this month both on and off-camera, so we’ll see what sort of progress we can make before June. Time to figure out how to get dialed in.
