Game Insights: Beyond the Fitting

Bringing you insights from the PING Proving Grounds, where our talented team of engineers, researchers, fitting experts and data scientists design and develop the newest product and fitting technologies to help you play better. Using the most advanced tools available, we’ll explain and explore the science behind golf-equipment performance. We’ll separate fact from fiction with the goal of helping you make informed decisions when choosing the PING equipment best suited for maximizing your performance.





My Game Insights: Beyond Your Fitting

By Chris Broadie

In 2004, PING introduced the PING Performance Scoresheet. The goal was to encourage players to track their on-course performance after a custom fitting, noting particular patterns and tendencies with every club.  However, this monitoring is easy to say in theory, but harder to execute in practice. Tracking shot-by-shot data needed to be much more efficient to be useful for the everyday golfer.
 

PING Performance Scoresheet
That Was Then
PING Performance Scoresheet Illustration of PING Performance Scoresheet, showing outlines of a fairway and green with a table to enter 9 holes of shot data. Putts Score Par 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Total A B C D E F G H I AVERAGE DRIVER DISTANCE
For PING, a post-fitting evaluation has always been an important part of the fitting process. Before digital fitting tools became available, the PING Performance Scoresheet (circa 2004) encouraged golfers to track their on-course performance.


A year earlier, in 2003, a revolution was underway to track and analyze shot-level data for both professionals and amateurs. The PGA Tour began recording ShotLink® shot-by-shot data, collected with the help of 350 volunteers per event. In the 20 years since its introduction, the PGA Tour now has a database filled with more than 20 million shots. Around that time, Mark Broadie, inventor of the Strokes Gained analytics tool, started collecting amateur shot-level data in a home-built Golfmetrics desktop program. After 1,000 hours of programming time and 20 minutes per round of data entry, Broadie had created a database containing over 100,000 shots.
 

Luckily for us, shot-collection technology has advanced tremendously in the past two decades. Instead of requiring 20 minutes per round or hundreds of volunteers per tournament, Arccos technology allows for automatic shot-level data capture via the seamless integration of smart sensors and the Arccos Caddie app. PING players using Arccos now record over 8 million shots per month; more data in a month than five years of PGA Tour ShotLink data!
 

Advancement of Digital Apps
This Is Now
Advancement of Digital Apps image of Arccos Shot Tracking on iPhone
With the advancement of digital golf apps, golfers now have a variety of options to capture shot data. For golfers who utilize Arccos, you can receive game insights from our team of data scientists based on your on-course shot patterns.


Arccos data provides tremendous value to both the golfer and to PING. For the golfer, Arccos is a combination of rangefinder, caddie and a virtual coach who can assess your strengths and weaknesses post-round using personalized Strokes Gained analytics. For PING, Arccos helps us provide PGA Tour level fitting service to everyone. PING Tour Rep Kenton Oates says, “Tour players are continually adjusting their fitting based on changes to their technique, key statistical trends in ShotLink® data, and changes in playing conditions. A Tour fitting, in a sense, is never ending.” We hope to leverage Arccos data to provide the same level of service and insights that Tour players experience on a weekly basis.

Now, we are excited to announce an addition to your PING Nation profile: My Game Insights.

For PING golfers with five or more Arccos rounds recorded, you can log into your PING Nation profile to view personalized insights on driver tee shot bias, approach-shot bias, set-gapping analysis, short/long analysis and overall Strokes Gained performance analysis.
 

My Game Insights
My Game Insights
My Game Insights gives a statistical overview of a player's performance with detailed fitting recommendation options.

The goal of My Game Insights is to find meaningful, statistically significant areas to improve your golf game. For example, seeing six drives in the left rough vs. two drives in the right rough after a single round is not a cause for concern; with eight missed fairways, you would expect to see six or more drives in the left rough 14% of the time. However, over 10 rounds, 60 drives in the left rough and 20 drives in the right rough would be concerning. For a well-balanced driver, this proportion of drives to the left should happen less than 1 in 10,000 times. This would be incredibly strong evidence that you should visit a PING fitter to help correct the driver’s left bias.
 

Each insight is designed to identify issues and recommend strategies to improve specific areas of your game. PING President John K. Solheim was the inspiration behind the approach-shot-bias analysis. “Arccos identified that I was missing approach shots to the left six times more than I was missing to the right,” Solheim says. “I brought this insight to one of our Master Fitters at the PING Proving Grounds, and, influenced by my on-course data, upgraded to a stiffer iron shaft. After four rounds I was hitting a lot more greens and I corrected my left-miss significantly.  Before-and-after results like this are why I really enjoy tracking every round and seeing how my data evolves.”

Before-and-after results like this are why I really enjoy tracking every round and seeing how my data evolves.

John K. Solheim
President, PING Golf

Like it did for John K., we truly hope that the My Game Insights unlocks the final on-course performance analysis piece of the fitting process. Arccos data moves us closer to the ultimate goal of combining the best golf equipment and best on-going­ fitting process to help golfers play their best. #FittingMatters

 


Chris Broadie
Head of Fitting Science

Chris earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from Cornell University in 2017. Chris researches club-ball impact and ball-flight physics, and helps develop new tools to analyze PING performance data. Chris is the lead data scientist behind PING ‘s innovative fitting applications; Ballnamic, Webfit, and the My Game Insights platform.

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