Some TrackMan data and a winter attack plan.

I updated my TrackMan today to TPS 3.0 and got it out to the range for a new Combine test.  It was pretty sweet as the new operating system didn’t miss a single ball and I shot one of the best scores to date:  73.7 (which I thought was my best score, but it looks like I hit 73.8 a few weeks ago.  But.. I was above 75 until the last few long shots knocked my score down (driver keeping me down once again).

For those of you not versed in this system, TrackMan is a ball flight monitor that is radar based to track both the club through impact and the ball flight.  I’ve had one for a while and use it to see what’s going on with my swing.  It helps me figure out  aspects of club path, face angle, attack angle, etc.  And, they have set up a “combine” that anyone in the world can use to test their current ball striking abilities compared to pros and top golfers across the globe.  This combine measure 60 shots from 60 yards to driver then gives you a score on how well you did according to proximity to the target in feet.  The current world record for this test is a 92.1 and there are a handful of PGA Tour players that have scored in the upper 80s to 90.  This pic shows some average scores according to different levels of golf player:

Screen Shot 2013-11-27 at 9.43.07 AM

Here is today’s combine for an example of how my specific score breaks down:

Combine 11/25/2013

As you can see I was pretty solid in the short game, but left the door wide open for targets of 180 and driver.  I suppose this makes sense as the long game is what is killing me in my actual game and this got me thinking that I need to create my own test from 170-200 yards to see if I can improve upon these distances.  Luckily, this is possible in the software so I created my own distance test to see how I would perform and was pretty shocked by the results:

Dan’s distance test

These results brought some great realization to the table.  Obviously, I need to work on the long game both finding my distances as well as figuring out how to control the club face through the impact zone.  Everything was way inside to out which makes for intense misses when that face isn’t correct to the path.  I need to figure out how to get the club going more squarely through the impact zone in order to tighten up my left and right misses.

All of this was confirmed yesterday when I played my old home track, CECC, for the first time in 6 months.  A member invited me out and it was great to see everyone out there.  I had missed that place and was happy to return for the day.

I started out hitting good drives on the first five holes and had a bunch of tap in pars, one missed 5 footer that resulted in a bogey and one birdie to be even through 7.   After that I started having some big misses with the driver, two balls hooked and ended up just 100 yards off the tee in the trees and one sliced into water.   Each of those three times resulted in double bogeys.  I ended up shooting an 80 out there almost solely from big tee misses.  When I hit a fairway it was par or better.

My misses need to get tighter and using TrackMan’s Combine is a good way for me to focus on that with added pressure.  I’ll be spending quite a bit of time working through this over the next 5,300 hours :)

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