Every golfer has weaknesses in their game, even professionals. When it comes to weaknesses though, sometimes its tough to identify them, or better yet, put your ego aside long enough to admit your game could use some improvement. With all this said, what is the best way to identify what part of your game is the weakest? How do you determine what part of your game is adding the most strokes to your score? In this post, we’ll discuss strategies to help determine exactly what part of your game needs work.
Here’s how to do it. Take a look at the scorecard below, you’ll notice a couple things. One – we’re not tracking score, but we’re tracking a ton of things during a round of golf, and after 3-5 rounds you’ll slowly become aware of your weaknesses, and can work to begin improving them. Here’s the things you’ll want to track:
– fairways hit
– greens in regulation or better
– putts
– up & downs
– sand saves
– penalty strokes
Interestingly, from all these items, you can easily tell pretty accurate what your score for the round would be, and with a few rounds of data, you can start determining if your driving needs work, your iron play to the greens, your short game or putting needs work. Depending on your handicap, you should also be aware of what’s considered ‘average’, and then what’s consider ‘above average’ and ‘below’. This way you can tell if you have much room for improvement in a specific area or not. Below are the average stats in each of these areas for professionals:
– fairways hit average – 60.68
– greens in regulation average – 65%
– putts – 28-30
– up & downs percentage – 57.91%
– sand saves percentage – 45-55%
When looking at these stats in closer detail, this means that on the average round even the best pros only hit the fairway 8-9 times a round (14 fairways to hit x 60.68%). The average pro only hits the greens in regular 12 out of 18 times. And get up and down from either the green side or bunker side about 50% of the time. So when trying to identify your weaknesses be sure to take into account what really needs work. Chance are, for most of you, your lost strokes reside in your short game and putting.
With this scoring method however you can quickly identify trends in your game, and then work on improving these areas to bring your score to the next level.