How I Analyze Player Statistics

All right, what's going on everyone? So in today's video, I'm going to be covering how I analyze statistics with my players, and I figured it would be the most straightforward, transparent, and direct way to just show you guys a new student that I'm going to be working with, um, actually watch me just go through analyzing his statistics and mapping out where I'm going to want to start with him as far as developing his game to accomplish his goals. So if you enjoyed this video, um, please go ahead, leave this video a like and subscribe to the channel if you're new here. Um, this channel is all about helping your junior golfer develop to play Division 1 golf. So that's what this video is going to be about. And if you want me to actually do this for your junior golfer, if you don't want to dig through all the statistics, you either don't have time for that or you're just like, whoa, this is a lot, um, there'll be a link below this video to learn a little bit more about my process overall. Uh, there's a lot of stuff that goes into it, not just the stat analysis. Portion. So there'll be a link below this video to learn a little bit more about my process and if, you know, this might be a good fit for your junior golfer. So anyway, let's go ahead and jump right into it. So what I'll be showing you guys is just me building out, you know, these statistics. So when I start working with a new player, the first thing I'm going to use is a spreadsheet that I built that essentially calculates what a player should shoot on average. And I find that to be really, really useful because if you look at one of these stat tracking tools— and there's a lot of them This one's personally my favorite. I use this with all my students, but it's going to show you stuff like their strokes gained. And I don't know about you, but for the most part, just looking at strokes gained doesn't really tell me like what I'm supposed to do with a student, um, you know, because there's lots of different things here. You might say like, oh, I should work on putting. It's like, okay, based on what? Because we perform poorly in putting for, you know, compared to some benchmark. That, that could be the case, but let's just say statistically, you know, there's a situation where let's say this player was way overperforming on his ball striking from 150 to 200 yards, and he wasn't hitting more than 50% of his wedges on the green from like 100 yards. Well, if I improve his greens and regulation, that's going to have a much larger impact on his scoring than his putting might. And, and this is, you know, depends on where this might come from. You know, if it was a situation like, hey, you know, he's 3-putting, you know, 3 times around, okay, well then that's probably going to be the highest use and highest and best use. But this could also be a scenario where he's got a lot of 15-footers, something like that, where, you know, if you made a few more of them, you know, it's recognizing that could happen. That's cool and all, but again, I'm going to want to start with the foundation. Sometimes it's just like, what's the easiest thing to do? Sometimes it's hard to learn how to make more 10 to 15-footers, but it's fairly easy to learn how to hit a lob wedge on the green. And so again, that's how I like to prioritize this stuff. I'm not saying this is gospel. I'm not saying this is the only way to do it. I'm saying this is the way that I do it, and, you know, so far it's worked really, really well. Um, so let's go ahead and just kind of dig these, these numbers out. So what I want to see here is greens regulation. So we're at 67.28, and specifically I'm looking at tournament data because ideally, you know, that's, that's where we're actually trying to perform. Um, 45 point— what was that? 45.28. Um, 5.03. 30 conversion rate, 21.1, and penalty rate, which is gonna be 2.38. All right. So that kind of gives us our, our starting point here. We've got these core statistics, um, and we can be very specific about this, but again, this is just, you know, getting things started. So we've got these core statistics. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna populate 'em into this next column here. Here. And what I'm going to do is change these numbers by up to 5%, but 5% is kind of like my default that I like to think in. 1% is just too small to notice any difference. 10% is just— it's a lot. So again, this isn't meant to be the most, you know, mathematically, um, you know, I didn't get out my calculus and start figuring out the derivatives here. This is just kind of like what I would kind of consider to be common sense, um, player development. But most people don't even go this far, so that's That's why I found that it works. And again, at the end of the day, that's kind of been my experience with this is, is that this works. So regardless of how you feel about these particular numbers or this methodology, I know that it works. If you got something that works better, show me that, show me the results. So anyway, if I move this down to 0, which is as much as it can do, got this little number here. It's going to show me how much improvement we would have on average as a result of that. So we can save 0.43 shots. Hopefully you guys can see that. If I improved my greens regulation, 0.68. If I improved my scrambling, 0.29. I brought this down like 3%, which is probably as low as we're going to get it, 0.37. And birdie conversion rate, 0.61. So you guys can see here, based on this data set, highest best use is going to be increasing this greens regulation, assuming we can get to 72% greens regulation. Now the other thing I'm going to notice here is our expected scoring average based on this data set should be 74. If I look over at this player's scoring average on Junior Golf Scoreboard, scoring average 75. So to some degree I could look at this and say, all right, well if we just continue to play at this level, well then we're going to improve our scoring average on Junior Golf Scoreboard and we're going to improve And so I think that's one of the big things that's important. A lot of people miss is like sometimes, you know, when you're just working with a player, let's say you come, you know, a player comes to you for a swing lesson, you have to change something because that's why they came to you. Right. And one of the things that the reason that I kind of structure my coaching the way that I do is like when I work with kids, it's how do we map out this path for you to play Division I golf in the most probable way possible? And so sometimes that involves me saying, hey, we need to blow everything up. We need to change it. You know, we need to change the swing. We need to change all this different stuff. Stuff. More often than not, it's actually like, hey, let's just stay the course here. Like, let's just keep on keeping on within this kind of like pattern. Because sometimes it's just as important to say when not to do something as when it is to do something, especially when we consider, you know, when we're trying to be the most effective with the resources that you might have. You know, sometimes it makes sense to travel across the country, sometimes it doesn't. And I, you know, that's what I do with my students is I tell them like, hey, you know, sometimes it makes sense to change your golf swing, sometimes it doesn't. And keeping them on kind on that right track is, you know, really important. So if I were trying to like model out like how do we improve the most fastest, it would be mapping out this greens regulation. Now if I took another step from here, said, okay, cool, we're probably not getting this to 77 realistically. So we've probably maxed out our greens regulation there. Now we can look at this and say, well, what if we, you know, again, brought this down to, you know, zero? Okay, that, you know, it's worth what it is. That's even worth even less. So one of the things you guys will hear me, um, talk about is like I don't really find short game to be that important as far as like scrambling goes. Um, that's not really going to lower our scores that much because the better ball striker you are, the fewer greens you miss, which means your short game becomes more and more irrelevant. Um, you can obviously counter that a little bit with, let's say you have par 5s or something like that, but again, in general, um, that's just kind of like what I find is we had a ton of par 5 greens, like we're gonna make more birdies. If you miss a lot of par 5 greens, we're not going to make as many birdies. And so that kind of factors into more in the greens regulation than it does into the scrambling. Um, or it might factor into like birdie conversion rate, which are kind of like downstream things. But for the most part, if you've got a junior golfer and they've got the option between improve greens regulation or improve their short game— oh, maybe their short game impacts their ability to hit more greens— but for the most part, we're looking at, we're going to improve greens regulation first. Um, you're going to see guys on tour focusing more on scrambling, but again, that's because they pretty much already maxed out greens regulation. Pretty much everyone on tour is going to be somewhere between 65 and probably, you know, 73% greens in regulation. 65 is gonna be like the really short hitters. Um, but again, like, that's, that's the way that I like to think through this stuff. So again, scrambling, not super important. Again, you know, we could take down free putting. But at this point, you guys probably guessed it, now we're really going to focus on birdie conversion rate. Okay, and so that's going to get us down to kind of this, you know, we should be shooting 72.67. and then let's just take another swing at this. We're still probably going to stay here. We're going to get this up to like 31%. Now, to be clear, there are guys on the PGA Tour, they're up around, you know, 35, 36, 40%. So that's kind of where I kind of see this kind of like asymptote, um, if you will, for, for all the math people out there. Um, if you're not familiar with it, pretty much just means like there's a ceiling, or you can't do better than that. And so that gets us to about a 72 scoring average. Now, if we looked at Junior Golf Scoreboard, we've got a 72 scoring average, we're going to be very, very successful, especially especially if we're playing long term. So again, this is just kind of a simple way to start off and like game plan. Like, okay, how do we get to where we're trying to get to? Just like big picture. And we can zoom into each one of these, but it's just like we gotta know like theoretically, like where are we going with this? Like we have to have a plan. We can't just go out there and say, hey, I'm just gonna start changing stuff. I don't like your strategy, let's change your mindset. It's like, how is that going to impact our play and how do we allocate our resources? Because This is so important. We all have limited resources. We have limited time. We have limited money. Even if we don't have unlimited time, or even if we do have unlimited time, even if we do have unlimited money, let's say you're Charlie Woods. You have a limited ability to allocate attention, right? We can't just grind for 10 hours a day and have hour number 10 just as valuable as hour number 1, right? It degrades over time. Probably the first 15 minutes is like probably pretty low quality as well. But there's kind of a peak and then drops off, right? And so in the same way, we need to be able to say, what's the theory of like what we're doing here? Like, what are we trying to accomplish? So that's starting point number one. Now, full disclosure, I have already looked over these statistics. So I'm going to go in a second level. And this is why, you know, it takes a little bit of thought here is I also want to look at this and say, where are we at over the last 5 rounds? Because, you know, especially when I'm working with a new student, usually I'm just getting their first 5. You know, this player had some previous data that he was able to import, which is really, really helpful. Um, but in this case, I want to look and make sure, okay, is this data representative of the player overall, right? So if we look at these last 5 rounds, we're actually going to see a slightly different picture. So one of the first things that should jump out at you is now we're at 61% greens regulation. Right? So if I'm building out a practice plan, then, you know, that's, that's one of the things that I'm gonna actually want to kind of note here is like, hmm, is this representative of this player, or is the more recent rounds kind of the thing we need to address first? So in this case, it's kind of my instinct here that, you know, I kind of want to address these, these 5 rounds first because, you know, it seems like the first 3 rounds that are in— because I'm looking at 8 rounds total are kind of skewing the numbers a little bit. So let's go ahead and pull those in. You guys will kind of see how this, this works in real time here. So again, scrambling— this is also really helpful when you look at and say, hey, I'm playing worse, and you're kind of unclear on like why. This is really, really helpful because you can be like, oh, I just need to do that a little bit better, um, rather than just kind of this being this existential like like, oh my God, my game's like disappearing and I don't even know what's happening. So, all right, cool. So again, if we look at this player statistics here, you know, this is last 5, this is the last 8. What do we have here? So we have a slightly different profile. Does that change our priorities? All right, so we can improve this by 0.69. Okay, great. We can improve this by 0.35. This is a big difference. Going from a 5% to an 8% is an absolute— like, it's a huge difference. So again, we can bring this all the way down to 3%, and that's probably, you know, what makes the most sense to start with here. Um, and again, so that, that's where I'm going to go here. I'm skipping a step on that last one, but I just— I've done this enough times where I know that's going to be the answer here. So that's kind of what this process looks like. So again, if we clean that up Well, now it changes our kind of next step here, right? So now pretty much already know that it's going to be greens and regulation that needs to improve, and I know that we've got the wiggle room there. All right, it's probably still going to be greens and regulation even if we improve it by 5%. So let's get it over to 71. Now we've got this nice kind of, you know, under 73 scoring average. Keep in mind, like, this is like— we're still playing tournaments through all this stuff. We want to make sure that the adjustments that we're making are holding up and changing you know, causing these variables to change. Those are just kind of like the map. It's like the first thing we want to see is like we want to see these things hold, right? And it's probably going to get a little bit better because we're going to practice on the right stuff, you know, each one of these subcategories. But just starting out, I'm going to keep these numbers the same and we really want to move this one. That's where our brain power is going to go. We bring that down, keep everything else the same, we improve by almost a shot. If we continue to improve the greens regulation, we're really disciplined on making sure that we're not pin hunting or anything stupid, you know, we're actually going out there and prioritizing, hit a ton of greens and make sure all these other numbers kind cold constant, which again, we're going to have stable practice to make sure that that's consistent. And then we're going to go ahead and get ourselves into this range. Now, once we kind of hit 70%, um, 75% is kind of like the, the ceiling that I see for, for greens regulation. So most likely the next step, or the final kind of cherry on top, so to speak, is that we're going to want to clean up our middle distance putting. So hopefully this is fairly clear for all you guys, uh, and then you might be able to push this all the way up to, you know, 30%, kind of like we did in that kind of initial example here. So now we're at, you know, sub, sub 72 here. So again, when we, when we look at these statistics, this really paints us a picture. This paints us a little bit different picture because we're prioritizing here. If we've got a little bit of bleeding, the first thing I want to address is this 3-putting. And if I look at this initial data set and I at least don't know this is a thing, I could be like, oh cool, we just need to like, you know, get the greens regulation up a little bit and tidy up the, the middle distance putts. But if this is the profile, well, that's a completely different thing. That's a little bit worse than our scoring average, right? So I want to make sure that I'm aware of that, I'm addressing that. So again, that's, you know, how we're analyzing these statistics now. The next kind of piece of this, and this kind of gets into how you should practice, which is another video that I'm going to put in this series, um, so you guys can kind of like see these two ideas separately. But this is just the stat analysis we're gonna be looking at. Okay, cool, from 3-putts, why are we 3-putting? This is a really important question because a lot of the time players just look at it and be like, oh, I'm 3-putting, I'm gonna do putting drills. But we want to ask ourselves why, right? Why is this happening? All right, so we've got these 3 different categories here, just like high level so you guys can kind of understand this. For the most part, under 7 feet has to do with the player's ability to start the ball online, right? So if I'm putting it, can I put it at my target, right? This is where a lot of players are going to spend time as far as like, maybe you're on a putting mat, maybe you're on a putting mirror, um, that, that type of stuff. These are going to be putts inside 7 feet. We're not playing a ton of break, and so it's just going to be based on can we start the ball kind of where we aimed. 7 to 21 feet is going to have to do with how well are we reading the greens and also matching our line with our speed. So, you know, we have to combine those two skills. This is where you're going to see a lot of tour players focusing on, um, because this is also going to be highly correlated with a player's ability to get up and down more frequently and to make more birdies, which on tour is going to be the main separating factor. Finally here, over 21 feet, really going to be correlated with lag putting. Right? So this is going to be your ability to get the right speed for your particular putts. It's going to have a lot to do with the player's touch. It's also going to have a lot to do with the player's kind of aiming strategy, which again I'll get into in other videos. But just so you guys kind of know high level, that's what these kind of, you know, 3 tools or kind of 3 categories are going to point out. So let's look at 7 feet. All right, cool. So in general, if we're 3-putting, we're going to see putts inside 5 feet as, as kind of like our first analysis. Um, the main reason for that is if we're hitting a ton of greens, which I want to coach all of my kids to hit a ton of greens— if you want to shoot low scores, you're going to want to hit a ton of greens— we're probably going to have putts from somewhere between 20 and 50 feet. 50 feet's kind of be your long one. If you've got a 60, 70, 80-foot putt, I mean, like, good luck, but you're gonna 3-putt sometimes from that. That's okay, you know. If we're 3-putting 3 times around because we hit all of our shots to like 70 feet, okay, like, we'll address that. But realistically, that's just unlikely considering the average green's roughly 20 yards wide, give or take, um, and, and give or take, you know, 20, 30 yards deep. So again, if we're hitting a remotely decent yardage, we shouldn't have putts outside of that. So again, we've got 20 to 50-foot putts. We're going to want to hit those putts inside 10% of that total distance. That's going to be a good putt for us. And so if we consider that A 20-foot putt should be inside of 2 feet, right? 30-foot putt inside of 3 feet. 50-foot putt, 5 feet, right? So that's how we want to think about that. So if we're trying to make sure we have an ironclad, just like we're not 3-putting— well, if we're bulletproof inside 5 feet where we get a 4-footer, we're just like, yeah, whatever, like I'm going to make this. And you know from 40 feet you can lag it inside 4 feet, Well, then it becomes a very low stress kind of way to play golf. And then you can kind of— it opens up the rest of your game. You can kind of say, all right, well, off the tee, let me just, you know, prioritize putting myself in a position where I can definitely hit the ball on the green. Okay, from that— and that really helps you prioritize, like, you know, trouble. And that's probably a video for another time, but it helps you prioritize, you know, which club you're gonna hit off the tee. Because if you prioritize safety a little bit too much off the tee, maybe you leave yourself at a yardage that you're not super comfortable with. Or if you push it a ton, if you take on a lot of trouble where you could have laid back and still had an equal probability at the green, it's like probably a better decision. So hopefully that makes sense, everyone. But anyway, at this point you can really prioritize just hit the green. You have a 30-footer, you pretty much know you're gonna make par, right? So first things first, I'm seeing, hey, we have some room to improve from 3 to 5 feet, at least in these recent rounds. And I know that this wasn't a part of the prior data set, so again, maybe the lag putt or the, the short putting is a little bit shaky. Um, so that I'm going to go over kind of how I'm going to address that in the next video on practice. That's the first thing I'm seeing though. Let's see what else here. So I'm seeing some 3-putts in this middle distance as well, which tells me that, you know, there might be some aiming stuff going on as far as like our distance we're trying to hit. We might be trying to make too many of these rather than just, you know, trying to hit them a good speed and have a good read and, you know, a percentage of them are going to drop. Um, so that's the other thing that kind of stands out to me. I don't see any putts made from 10 to 15 feet, which is, you know, interesting because our birdie rate hasn't dropped off too much, which tells me that, you know, this player is probably doing pretty well on the par 5s, um, and making, you know, good use of those. But that's kind of like the big thing that I'm seeing here. Now let's see if anything else here. So the other thing I'm seeing, it's kind of sketchy, is I would like to see a little bit sharper lag putting, especially on these longer putts here. So you guys can see, like, you know, 45 to 50 feet, I would like to see this at 4.5 or 4. Um, we're at 7. 40 to 45 feet, we're at 6. I'd like to see that again at, you know, somewhere in the 4 range. You know, 35 to 40, we're at 7. Again, I'd like to see that closer to 3. So once we're at inside 35 feet, we've got a pretty decent shot at this. Um, it's not too bad. But outside of 35 feet, which we're going to have a decent quantity of our shots being from that distance, we're going to give ourselves a decent probability of 3-putting. Now, our overall numbers aren't too bad because we're making an outsized percentage of over 25-foot putts, but I'm not putting any money on we're going to be able to reliably make 12% of our, you know, 30-footers, um, in order to make these statistics work. I'm going to say, okay, we probably need to sharpen up our lag putting And so that's how I'm looking at the putting statistics specifically. Um, if we go ahead and kind of look at the other piece of this, this pie here, um, you know, because if I'm looking at this, right, our next place we're gonna have to go is greens regulation. So let's sort of get a leg up on this. Where can I improve greens regulation? All right, cool. Actually, the first thing I'm going to do— sorry about that— is I'm going to look at greens regulation par 3s, par 4s, and par 5s. right? So this is going to kind of give me a picture of where this player is like performing well and, and, um, you know, maybe struggling a little bit because each one of these holes has slightly different strategy, right? A par 3 is pretty straightforward. You know, it's like you tee it in the ground, it's a longer shot, and you need to hit it on the green. You don't have to think there. Um, junior golfers in my experience tend to actually play 3s fairly well relative to the other holes. Par 5s require 2 strategic decisions. So they require the tee shot. We got to hit that in play, but there's a real emphasis on the second shot, right? Making a decision there. A lot of junior golfers will hit that second shot into a bunker or something dumb or in a lake because they're just not really sure if they should lay up or go for it. And they kind of end up in these in-between distances and they hear someone says that they should go for it and someone says they should lay up and they're just kind of uncommitted. Um, and so that's kind of an opportunity. It's like, hey, we might have a situation where We're actually not bad, we're just making poor decisions, and we can see that in the data. Par 4s really going to have a lot to do with like, okay, what is that second shot leaving us, and do we have a high probability of hitting on the green, um, from that second shot spot? So again, I can map out strategically where's my tee shot going, does it put me in a spot or a high probability of performing at the level that I would like to? So if I'm looking at these statistics, you know, greens regulation on par 4 is kind of like my first place that I'm gonna see. Par 3s, we're not getting this better than 70%. That's excellent. Um, par 5s, it could be improved, but it— not, not by a ton. Um, so again, par 4s are going to be like kind of the major skin-on-the-bone place here. Um, I mentioned that, you know, this player is probably playing par 5s fairly well, and he is doing it fairly well. Par 4s, definitely struggling as far as scoring average. Par 3s are excellent, so no, no question there. So That's gone to approaches, right? What I'm kind of looking for here is like, all right, how many of these numbers are kind of at that 50% range? Because let's say that all of them were, you know, let's say all of them are roughly at 50%. Well, that tells me we don't have any trouble off the tee. We just need to get better with whatever our approach shots are, right? Which is going to form how we practice. Versus if we look at that and we say, hey, our, you know, we're actually really good from here. So I can pretty much instantly say that like our average approach on par 4s is not 100 to 125 yards unless we're hitting in the trees like 15-20% of the time. Again, 125 to 150, probably the shorter shots we have in on par 4s, um, at 58%. But again, doesn't fully explain that 50% greens regulation. So again, could be off the tee, um, and that's a conversation, or it could be we just need to improve a little bit, right? So this is kind of like the first one. It's like a big drop-off here, which I highlight here. For this player, he's probably still hitting a pitching wedge or a 9-iron. You should be able to do a little bit better than 58%. All right, let's move into the kind of next section here. All right, now we're starting to see something— 150, 175 yards. So if I were to guess just off the top of my head, a lot of this player's approach shots are probably coming from 125 to 175 yards based on the fact that this is 45%, the other one's 58%. And if I kind of split the difference there, that gets you about 50% greens hit. Maybe it skews a little bit closer, and then we have kind of offset by, you know, maybe we're hitting in the trees every now and then, but that kind of starts to paint a picture. And so if we were to prioritize, where are we going to spend our time? It's probably in this 125 to 175-yard number to improve that, to improve the greens regulation, to improve long-term development. And then 175 to 200 yards, Again, that can improve a lot, but it also kind of like begs the question for me, is there some strategic decisions that we're making? Because we're doing very, very well on par 3s, but for some reason these numbers are where they're at. So either we're playing really short par 3s, which seems unlikely, or there's a strategic thing. So hopefully you guys can kind of see, just like working through these numbers, this is what I do with every single one of my students at least once a quarter, is actually look at their game and say, okay, cool, how are we going to get where we're going? And like, where do we need to, to go specifically? Um, this is how I kind of map out like, you know, is this just a time, energy, and effort thing of just like, hey, you need to, you know, hit more 9-irons instead of 7-irons? Is this a strategic thing? You know, are we not hitting it to the correct places? Um, is this a technical thing? We're trying to do all the right stuff, we just can't do it. Um, those are all different things that are going to come out within these numbers. So hopefully this is helpful for you guys just to understand like how this analysis process goes. And like I said, in the, in the next video in this series, I'll actually map out like how this translates into practice. But again, hopefully you guys again can see like, you know, just moving from 8% to 3%, number one, we're improving by about a shot, right? So just like theoretically, hopefully that makes sense. Then you guys can also saw practically, it's like we're gonna have to bring up our lag putting a little bit, especially out of 30— outside of 35 feet, and we're also going to need to bring up our putting inside 5 feet, right? And then we're also going to want to improve that 125 to 175-yard approach shots so we can bring up this greens regulation, right? So if we just make those two adjustments, right? And so I kind of like to think about these separately, um, you know, this one is more important than this one. But again, a lot of these things are going to kind of happen at the same time. So you can see over, you know, essentially a couple of, you know, focused cycles, which is just essentially like, here's what we're trying to do, let's not change it, let's not do a bunch of random stuff, you know, we could go from a scoring average of 75, you know, which by, you know, by all means is, is not a bad place to start, to a scoring average of, you know, 73.5, um, in a relatively short period of time. And so, you know, in that case, we've improved by roughly— what is that, a shot, shot and a half? Um, you know, for me, when I'm working with players, they improve by about you know, it's been ticking up. So it goes for about 3.35 shots per year now. And this is how it's done. It's very methodical, and it's just like, hey, here's where you're at, you know, here's, here's mathematically the fastest way for you to get there, um, and here's what you need to do to go and do it. And then a lot of the coaching comes from just, you know, the different scenarios and making sure we stay on that track. So again, hopefully this video is helpful for you guys. If you want me to do this for your junior golfer, um, again, there will be a link below where you can learn a little bit more about my process and, um, you know, kind of look at, you know, if it might be a good fit for your junior golfer to do this. Um, but if you guys enjoyed this video, please leave a like, and if you're new to the channel, please go ahead and subscribe. I'll see you guys in the next one.