6 Most Important Skills In Golf
In this instructional video Connor Stirling Peterson outlines six key statistics that junior and aspiring competitive golfers should track to lower their scores. He critiques the complexity of strokes‑gained metrics and proposes a simpler, practice‑focused framework. The six stats are: (1) Penalty rate off the tee – how often a player incurs a penalty (out‑of‑bounds, hazard, etc.) and its impact on scoring; (2) Greens in regulation (GIR) – the percentage of holes where the green is reached in regulation strokes; (3) Scrambling – the ability to make par after missing the green; (4) 3‑putting – frequency of taking three putts, broken down into lag‑putt and short‑putt proficiency; (5) Birdie conversion rate – how often a player makes birdie when the green is hit, reflecting proximity and mid‑range putting; (6) Compound errors – sequences of missed shots that compound loss beyond the individual stats. Connor explains how each metric is measured, why it matters, and provides concrete examples showing how a 5 % improvement in each translates into expected shot‑gain (e.g., 0.9 shots saved by reducing penalty rate). He then demonstrates a prioritization process: first eliminate compound errors, then focus on penalty rate, followed by 3‑putting, GIR, scrambling, and birdie conversion, using a sample scoring‑average model (83 → ~82). The video also contrasts amateur targets with PGA Tour averages, illustrating where certain stats (e.g., 3‑putting) have diminishing returns at the elite level. Throughout, Connor emphasizes practical, low‑hang‑fruit practice ideas (controlling shot shape, solid contact around the greens, lag‑putt consistency) and encourages systematic tracking to guide coaching and self‑improvement, especially for players aiming for college golf or mid‑70s handicap levels.
Chapters
All right, what's going on everyone? So in today's video, I'm going to be going over what I believe are the 6 most important skills in golf that you need to develop, or your junior golfer needs to develop, if they want to play golf at a high level and they want to score well. I'm going to walk you through each one of these, how to measure them, and how it's going to help you shoot lower scores. And if you enjoy videos like this, then be sure to like and subscribe. To the channel for more videos like it so you get it pushed up in your feed, and it also helps the channel grow. So let's go ahead and jump right into this. So you guys are gonna kind of see here on the screen I have the 6 things listed out in a spreadsheet that I like to use with all of my students, but we're just gonna go down this list here and you can see 5 of those, and then I'll share the last one with you at the end here. But these are the 5 skills or the 6 skills that I find to be the most valuable stats to be tracking for your game if you want to shoot lower scores. Now, why, why do I say that? You know, there's a lot of different stat tracking tools out there. Most people are very familiar with strokes gained, and that can be a really valuable tool, especially if you're on tour and that's who you're measuring yourself against. But in my opinion, working with a lot of players, I've found that strokes gained can actually be fairly confusing. And the main reason for that is actually fairly simple. If I were looking at, you know, let's say approach shot data, right, and I hit an approach shot and my ball is 25 feet away from the hole on average and I move to 21 feet on average, well then that, you know, that's a pretty impressive improvement. Like, that's, that's very meaningful from a strokes gained perspective. But from a statistics perspective and from an actual practicality of a player being able to intentionally do that on a golf course it's very difficult to see the difference between 25 feet and 21 feet, considering that we're talking about hitting 10, 20, 30 shots and kind of aggregating that as the average. So sometimes we're hitting it to like 2 feet, sometimes we're hitting it to 45 feet. So it's not really that helpful. And I see a lot of players really struggle with that, where they are trying to hit the ball close, and it actually causes them to shoot worse than they're currently shooting because everyone's trying to hit as close as they can. But they think that they need to do something more in order to be able to score better, and actually causes them to score worse. And I'll actually show you guys there at the end which stat I see that actually impact the most, so I'm able to kind of identify that. But the first stat that I would highly, highly, highly recommend that you start tracking if you don't already is penalty rate off the tee. Now, why penalty rate off the tee? Well, a lot of the time you'll see traditionally that people take something like fairways hit, right? Um, you know, how many times are you in the fairway? In theory, that's going to be like, oh, you're gonna be able to make more birdies from there. And there's kind of a couple of problems with that. Number one, hitting the ball in the fairway doesn't actually help you that much. I think on tour it's worth about 0.25 shots, um, per time. So it's not nothing, you know, like if you hit significantly more fairways, then that can add up, especially if you're playing at a very high level. But for the most part, with most amateur golfers, their problem isn't that they hit, you know, don't hit enough fairways and they don't have enough opportunities for birdies. For the most part, they're just trying to avoid bogeys. And so the reason that I really like to look at penalty rate is it tells me how effective the player is off the tee. You know, if they're in the rough but they still have a line at the green, I don't really care that much. It doesn't really matter too much as far as their overall scoring because, you know, then we're going to go into the next phase of this which is looking at whether or not they can get the green. But unless they're— if they're out of bounds, if they're at hazard, or if they're in the trees to some degree, which is separate from penalty rate, I understand that. But if they're hitting it out of bounds or in a penalty off the tee, it's like right away we're adding multiple shots to, to our scoring average. And so this is one of the most important stats that you're going to want to track consistently, is penalty rate off All right, so the next most important statistic to be tracking— and to be clear, this is not in rank order, these are all important numbers— but the next one that I want to draw your attention to is Greens Regulation. This is a traditional stat that, you know, lots of people are familiar with taking, and it's probably one of the only traditional stats that actually tells us a lot about what you're going to score. And that's greens regulation. So when we look at this, the reason this statistic is so valuable is because if you tell me you hit 70% of your greens on average, it's just going to be very difficult for you to score poorly. I don't care what your proximity is, if we're hitting 70% of our greens— greens are only so big— and so just by virtue of that fact, I know you're going to have, you know, putts inside of a reasonable distance, you know, a decent percentage of the time. And that means, you know, we're gonna make a few birdies. And even if we 3-putt more than we should, it's really going to be hard to 3-putt a ton to the point where it's way worse than just missing the green altogether. You know, for example, if you got up and down 70% of the time, that's amazing. But if you 3-putted 30% of the time, that's absolutely atrocious. And so greens regulation is probably one of the easiest ways to just focus on that, focus on getting that number as high as possible if you want to start shooting lower scores. And at the end of this video, I'm also going to show you guys how you can kind of easily see how these, uh, impact the, the scoring average at the end of the day. So the next one here is scrambling. So scrambling, again, is kind of one of the more traditional ones. Those of you guys who are more familiar with strokes gained might not like this one quite so much, but the reason that I like to keep track of it is I want to know what the player is going to shoot. That's the main concern I have. And so when I look at scrambling, it tells me what happens when we don't hit the green in regulation. Are we going to make par or are we going to make bogey? And that just helps me kind of keep track of that. It also helps the player understand how penalizing is it when you miss the green. So if you have that number, that can be really, really valuable. Now, scrambling is not a direct representation of your short game, right? Your short game is a combination of, you know, your ability to land the ball in the right spot, but it also has to do with where you left yourself. If you have really tough shots, um, yeah, that's going to be a problem. And strokes gained can account for that, but it's not necessarily, you know, the most helpful thing in the world, at least for the player who's kind of, you know, in the mid-80s, 80s, mid-70s, even low 70s. You know, it can kind of be a challenge for a tour player, very valuable, but for the average player who's not really hitting that many greens, scrambling's super important for them to understand, okay, how penalizing is it when I miss the green? And oftentimes it just emphasizes how much more important it is for them to just focus on hitting more greens rather than trying to make par more often. So that's scrambling. Um, the next one is 3-putting. So 3-putting is, is massive. If you wanted to shoot lower scores, cutting down on 3-putts is probably one of the easiest, uh, things that you can do. Because at the end of the day, if we're hitting a bunch of greens but if we're 3-putting, we're kind of losing those shots there. If we cut down on our 3-putts, we are going to gain a lot of shots back. And so do you have a frame of reference on how to develop this? 3-putting really comes down to 2 things. It comes down to your ability to lag putt, and it comes down to your ability to make your shorter putts. So for example, for hitting a decent number of greens, we're probably going to have putts somewhere between 20 and 40 feet. And if we're doing, you know, if we're an effective lag putter, then we're probably going to roll that ball somewhere in the range of 10% of that total distance. So if I have a 4, you know, 40-footer and I leave myself a 3.5-footer, that's a really good lag And then it becomes like, okay, can I make my putts roughly inside 5 feet? If I can do that reliably, I'm just not going to 3-putt that often. And it doesn't really matter how good my overall putting is or whatever. If I can do those two things effectively, if I can make putts inside 5 feet and I can lag putt inside 10% of my total distance, well then it's going to be very easy for me to, to score. And if I'm struggling here, it also becomes very clear to me what I need to focus on. I either need to improve my lag putting, my short putting, or both. And so that's why 3-putts is, is super, super important to be tracking. The 5th one is birdie conversion rate. So this one is important to understand because it again brings a few of these numbers together. Um, it's going to bring together your, your greens hit and more so your proximity, I should say, rather than the greens hit, because it's normalizing for, you know, when we do hit the green, how often do we make birdie. So it's going to get us our proximity as just kind of a rough estimate of like if, if every time you hit the green you're birdieing 1 out of 3 holes, that's going to be better than if you're birdieing the green or, um, making birdie 1 out of every 10 holes. And so this is going to be that, and it's going to be your ability to make kind of middle distance putts because for the most part that's where our birdies are going to come from. So that kind of gives us an idea there. And then the 6th one, the last one, is what I call compound error, um, or your compound— your strokes lost compound errors. And so what that is, is that's just shots that are not accounted for with these numbers, right? So if we're in a situation here where we, you know, miss our approach shot and then we miss the next shot as well, so we— it takes us, you know, 4, 5, 6 shots to get on the green, then that's going to come out in kind of a compound error. And what I've found for the most part is a lot of people really neglect this number, and it's because they're trying to focus and saying, hey, I need to make par, I need to get up and down, I need to make birdies. And it actually causes them to make their scores worse than they would have been otherwise. Instead of just saying, hey, I missed the green, I'm probably going to make bogey, and if I make par, you know, that's a nice plus. It, it comes out of them trying to like push and, and try and really, uh you know, make up for missing the green, which is not really something that you can do in golf. You kind of have to, you know, deal with what you got off the tee, deal with what you got on approach, and then make the most of that. And if you get lucky every now and then, then great. But those are the 6 statistics that I really recommend tracking because it's really going to help you predict what your numbers are going to be. Now let's kind of go through these and just kind of break down what are the skills involved in them. So penalty right off the tee, it's simply your ability to control your shot shape off of the tee, right? So if we're able to curve the ball predictably, we're probably not going to have a ton of penalties because we're going to have some understanding of where the trouble is. We're going to be able to curve the ball, um, away from the trouble, or at least have a manageable curve relative to that. If we've got 60, 70 yards out there, then hopefully we're not curving the ball 100 yards, which is going to mean that we can kind of effectively you know, aim away from whatever the trouble is. Greens regulation, pretty similar concept. Are we able to predictably curve the golf ball? If we're trying to work the ball in all these different directions and trying to hit it close, that can be kind of challenging. But if we just prioritize hitting the green, then we can say, okay, well, the average green is roughly 20 yards wide. Unless I'm hitting some crazy 40-yard curve, I should be able to hit the green a decent number of times. Scrambling for the most part, it's going to have to do with where you leave the ball. So it makes you be a little bit more mindful of, well, am I giving myself the crazy flop shot, you know, over the bunker, out of the rough, on a downhill lie? Or am I leaving myself on the fringe where I've got— essentially I'm putting and I don't even feel like it counts as an up and down if I get it up and down? That's something you want to consider with your scrambling. 3-putting, uh, or you've kind of lined this out, but it's just lag putting. Making your short putts. Birdie conversion rate is just going to be how close do you hit it and how often you make your middle distance putts. Then compound errors is just making sure that you're not really doing any extracurricular activities, you know, like you, you miss the green, you chip it up on the next one. It's pretty straightforward. And so there is a priority order that you're going to want to work through these. And so I'll just go ahead and show that to you guys. I'll kind of like move these numbers around a little bit. Now I'll just go ahead and actually start these off so it's a little bit more interesting. Maybe it's a little bit closer to what you guys might be seeing for yourselves here, but let's just go ahead, let's do this. Let's say my scoring average is 83. All right, cool. So based on these numbers, this is, you know, pretty simple math, but your scoring average should be about 9 over 81 on, on most golf courses. Now let's say for the sake of this you have a scoring average that's actually 83. So this is why it's so important for you to actually track your numbers. So we're losing 2 shots compound errors. Now that, that's the first thing we'd want to clean up, right? It'd be like, why is that happening? Because usually it's just— if it's as simple as like make solid contact around the greens or just prioritize getting your third shot on the green from like 10 yards, 15 yards, 20 yards, and that's going to be the lowest hanging fruit in your game. So let's just say we can clean that up. Just right out of the gate. We're pretty much playing the number, and this isn't going to be perfect, but let's just say we can get this pretty dang close. Then we're going to look at this and we're going to say, okay, cool, take these numbers over in priority order. If I improved any one of these just a little bit, what does that do to my expecting score— expected scoring average here, right? So let's say I improve my penalty rate by 5%. Well, that's going to improve my, my game by about 0.9 shots on average. Let's say I improve my greens regulation rate by 5%. 0.72. So not quite as good, but, you know, still pretty decent. What about scrambling? 0.45. Okay, so not quite as good. 3-putting, 0.9. All right. And birdie conversion rate, 0.45. All right, so you guys can already kind of see here, if we're going to make a decision about how are we going to priority order this based on just like what's going to be the easiest to do, we've already talked about the compound errors, right? So that's going to be the easiest one, just making sure you have solid contact around the greens, not doing anything dumb. The next one that I would go after is penalty rate. Reason for that is in this model I've just accounted for penalties being worth one shot, but we also know that sometimes you get out of bounds worth two shots. So it's probably a little bit more than 0.9. So let's just say we can take that one down. Everything else we can pretty much stay at the same level. And now we've just improved by almost a shot without really doing a lot of work. You know, this is just saying, okay, cool, let's make sure that I can reliably curve the golf ball. If you're working with your golf coach, that's what you'd want to spend your time on. Then you can go to the next one, say, okay, cool, well, I've done that. Now what? Well, we remember that our 3-putting was the next Yeah, biggest opportunity there. Boom, we've got another shot right there. We haven't touched any other part of our game. We've just touched the lowest hanging fruit. And what you'd want to do, and this is what I do with all my students, is you just go through this systematically and say, okay, what's the lowest hanging fruit? How do we solve that as quickly as possible? And then how do we move on to the next lowest hanging fruit? And so you guys might be looking at this and saying, okay, well when I look at guys on tour, all of them are focused on kind of their 7 to 21-foot putts. They're all focused on their proximity, and they're all focused on their short game. How come they're doing that, but Connor, you're telling me this is, this is completely different? And that's a good question. So here's what you're going to see on PGA Tour. Scoring average is going to be, or greens regulation, somewhere in the 65% range. If they're really competitive, probably closer to 70%. There, there's absolute limits on this, you know. There's kind of asymptotes, so to speak. It's probably around 75%, 80%. You're probably not going to do a whole lot better than that. So let's just say for the sake of this, you're right at 70%, you can't do a whole lot better. This is also going to be dictated to some degree by the size of the greens. Let's say you're scrambling about 55%. That's pretty dang good. 3-putt rate, it's about 3% on tour. And then we're looking at your birdie conversion rate. Let's say it's closer to 25%. This is pretty much what you see on tour. You got a scoring average about 71-ish. That's a little bit under par. And so what are my options to improve? Well, I can't get my penalty rate below zero. Tour players don't hit it out of bounds. Tour players don't really hit it in the hazard that often. I can't really hit more greens. I can maybe improve my scrambling a little bit. I can't really 3-putt any less. Can I get down to 2% or— no, let's just show you guys here. You see the improvement here. Let's take this down to 2%. It's worth 0.18 shots, not, not too crazy. And it's just really hard to do. You know, you're gonna have to play a lot of golf to be able to do that. Or you look at, you know, let's just make a few more birdies. 0.63. if we improve our scrambling, where does that get us to? Let's see here. Let's say we got it to 60%, 0.27. So you can kind of see what once was really valuable, just not 3-putting, is no longer as valuable just because there's not a lot of meat on that bone. And so this is really the way that you want to look at your statistics when you're tracking them, no matter what tool you're looking at. If you have these numbers then you can really systematically go through this and say, it's like, what are the skills that I need to practice? How do I want to practice those skills? And if you're tracking these and they're improving, then you can pretty much say, okay, cool, here's how long I think it's going to take me to improve, or here's what my game's going to need to look like in order to shoot the scores that I want to shoot without having to do some crazy math calculations or anything. You can just say practically, well, if I can control my shot shape off the tee, if I can control my shot shape on approach, if I can just hit the ball reasonably solid around the greens, and I can 2-putt most of the time, like, you're already shooting in the mid to low 70s on average. And, you know, for a lot of you guys, that's going to be good enough. You know, that's going to be a +2, +3, +4 handicap, and you're going to be able to compete at a very high level. And then you can start to look at this stuff and saying, how do I hit it closer? How do I make more birdies? But I hope this video is helpful for you, especially if you're kind of, you know, getting started. Um, maybe you're kind of in the mid-80s, 80s, you know, mid-70s, you're kind of like, how do I get to this next level? How do I compete at a higher level without bringing all these like crazy things into my head? Um, how do you use statistics without just becoming dependent on that? How do you make it really practical? So I hope this was helpful for you guys. If you enjoy videos like this, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Drop one of these every single week, uh, so you guys will be learning more stuff about this and just overall how to develop as a player. Especially if you want to go on to play college golf. So like I said, hope you guys enjoy this, and I'll see you in the next one.
