Improving Your Golf Score - Part 2

I don't want you thinking that I'm intentionally misleading you. This blog is not about different techniques to use to improve your game. This blog is about ways to quantify if something you change is actually working or not. Say, for example, you just started playing golf. You golf for 3-4 months and learning as you go. You read articles online, watch the Golf Channel, or any other free advice you can get. While you're doing this, you're keeping track of your statistics. Then on the 4-5 month you start to take private lessons. After 3-4 months more of taking data, you can actually see if those private lessons helped, you can see if the private lessons increased your learning curve and all sorts of other things.

Also, if you learn of this great new swing to use with your drive, after a couple rounds you can see if it actually helped out your swing. You might find that while you're out on the golf course that this new swing or new driver actually helped your game a lot, but, when you look at the numbers you see a different story. This might lead you to having to increase the amount of practice balls you hit or whatever you do to practice.

Having said that, to keep track of my golfing stuff I created a spread sheet on Excel. Here's what it looks like:

The top half of the spread sheet is the part where you input your data from your scorecard (read Improving Your Golf Score - Part I for more information). As you can see, I set mine up with long and short shots (which included my tee shots) where long was >100 yards and short was <=100 yards. I also split it up into 9 hole segments because sometimes I just could not finish 18 holes due to weather, money, or any other variable. I also kept track of whether or not my tee shot was in the fairway or not and how many greens in regulations I made.

For this bottom section I just put my cumulative score for the 9 holes in here. As I put them in, it automatically updates all other parts. It calculates my handicap with a simple calculation, ((score-36)*2=18 hole handicap; if you don't multiply by 2, you get your 9 hole handicap). From this, I see that I can expect to shoot anywhere from a 45 to a 68 every 9 holes. I can see that I'm most likely to shoot a 53.

I'm going to make this file available for download in the next blog so that you can mess with it. I have a few things I need to tweak/update on it. I encourage you, in the meantime, to figure out what data you want to collect. Set it up with the length of shot as I did in this example or check Improving Your Golf Score - Part 1 for other options. Also, if you want to go ahead and make your own spreadsheet, more power to you. Then you can just check it with the one that I have up for download next time.

Stay tuned for Part 3 where I start going into a little heavier techniques. Also coming is another blog on improving something else.