This Is The Best Golf Stats App

All right, what is going on everyone? So in today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you, in my opinion, what is the best stats tracking app on the market. This is going to be really great for you, especially if you have a junior golfer who wants to play elite level golf, they want to play college golf or even beyond that. Then the foundation of helping them have that success is going to be tracking their stats on a regular basis. It's just a fundamental— this is something every elite player is doing. And this is something that you guys can start to incorporate into your process as well. If you enjoyed videos like this, go ahead and click the button below to subscribe to the channel and like it if you want to see more videos like this. Helps push the channel out, um, make sure that you see it in your feed. So anyway, let's go ahead and hop right into this. What is the best stat tracking app? In my opinion, um, it is Circles. Uh, it's called Draw More Circles. If you go to drawmorecircles.com, I'm not being paid to say this. I probably should be, but this is the app that I use with all of my students, and this is the app that I recommend getting. So I'm going to go ahead and walk you guys through it and just kind of highlight a few things that I find extremely useful about this and some things that you can start to use with your child to really help them understand their game a little bit better. Now, the first thing you'll see over here is you can toggle based on tournaments, practice and tournaments, the number of rounds that they've played or entered. And you can change the benchmark here. So you can say whether you want to compare to scratch or NCAA, et cetera, et cetera. You can go based off of that information. So that's really, really powerful stuff. You can also see how much they've improved over the recent time period. This isn't 100% accurate. I'm gonna be totally honest here. But what you actually want to do, and where this is really, really powerful, is you can see the trend line based on, you know, the player's performance. You can see, are we getting better, are we getting worse, or if we stay about the same. So I'm just looking at my own numbers here, but I can kind of see through all of these where my trends are. And if I zoomed out even further, if I wanted to look at all time, then I could do that. If I wanted to get a smaller swath, I could look at, you know, 10 rounds, you know, or 3 months or what have you. And this is just really powerful because if you're looking at one round of golf, it doesn't really tell you that much. You know, if you just look at, hey, I played good or I played bad, it doesn't really tell you a whole lot of information. You know, it's like you could have landed on tree branches and bounced off cart paths or whatever, but if you're always bouncing off the cart path, it's like that's going to come out your numbers that are, um, you know, a little bit more robust. So if that's the case, then it's like, okay, that's a real problem. But if it happens at one event, it's not really anything to think about. So this is the way— this should be like the dashboard that you use for your child, understanding that their game and what their problems are. Because let's say you're going to a swing coach, right? And the idea is that your approach play and off the tee play should be getting better. So you should see a positive trajectory working with that coach. And if not, then you can say, hey, something's wrong here. Either we need to go find a different coach or we need to fill a knowledge gap. The same sense, like if you change putters. Well, you want to say like, okay, well, when did we change the putter? You can go up here and say, you know, I want to look at a custom period and say, I know I changed my putter at this date. How is the performance improved? How has it changed? You know, maybe, uh, you went to left-hand low to try and make more 5-foot putts, and your left hand— like, your putting inside 7 feet started, you know, going— getting way better, but your lag putting got bad. You lost some of your feel that you had from the conventional. That's something that you'd want to see and you'd be able to see in these numbers. Then you can make an intelligent decision of whether or not that trade-off is worth it. You can go back to what you're doing. The same thing is true for if you're out there and you wanted to play with different feels. You're like, I want to see how this feel impacts my numbers. Boom, right here. Now this is just the high-level stuff. This is face value, but the numbers that I really love, I'm going to kind of walk you through my favorites. I always talk about greens and regulation. Probably the most important, easiest to understand statistic for helping players, you know, implement and improve. If you get more greens per round, it's gonna be easier to shoot lower scores. If you're only hitting 40% of your greens, good luck shooting even par on a regular basis. It's just not gonna happen. It's gonna be too hard, um, it's gonna put too much pressure on your short game. But if you can hit high greens in regulation, that's gonna be really great. That's where you find it there. Um, next one that we want to look at, scrambling. Really, really valuable number. Not necessarily for understanding short game per se. Um, controversial take that I have: short game is not really that important, mostly because if you want to be an elite player, then you're going to need to hit a ton of greens. And as you hit more and more greens, then your ability to get up and down matters less and less because it happens less and less frequently. And it also is primarily dictated by your ability to leave yourself in good spots. Kind of like when you're putting off the fringe and it counts as an up and down, versus if you're hitting a flop shot over a bunker, nobody gets that up and down, um, or at least they don't do it very often. And maybe you see the one heroic shot, but for the most part, if we're looking at 10, 20, 30 rounds, that player is not going to be that successful from that spot no matter how good they are. And so scrambling is just a really important number to know to understand what should happen when we miss the green. How often should we be making bogey? How often should we be making par and just kind of accept that that. Um, the next ones here that are super, super valuable is to understand your greens regulation on par 3s, par 4s, and par 5s. If you know that, you can say, okay, well, I want my greens regulation to get better, but I, I don't necessarily know where the easiest place to improve that. So if I were just looking at my own numbers, I'm only hitting 70% of my greens regulation on par 5s. That's, that's an easy, you know, low-hanging fruit for me to say if I'm just more intentional about you know, I know that I hit the green about 92% of the time from 175— or from 75 to 100 yards. If I just hit myself there on my layup, I've gone from hitting 70% of my greens on par 5s to hitting 92% of my greens on par 5s. That's a lot. And that's assuming that I never hit the green in 2. And so having insights like that are super, super powerful for, for your child to understand, okay, we want to increase greens regulation and our par 5s are dragging. Well, then that gives us— tells us a little bit more about what to do with their you know, with their strategy on that hole. Maybe they go away from just hitting as close to the green all the time, leaving themselves 40-yard shots. They can just leave themselves an easy shot and know that that's going to increase that number. Now sure, you can make an argument that they should learn how to do that skill, and that's fine, but you also want your kid to be able to score. And, you know, sometimes we have to say, okay, we're just going to play to what we have, and then we can work on developing it if that's that important. But it's really going through this, you know, priorities list here. Yeah, par 4s, doing a really great job there. Par 3s could be improved a little bit, but for me, if I'm looking at how do I go from, you know, 62 to 72%, easiest one is just start hitting the par 5s a little bit better. And it also tells me that when I'm on a par 4, I can kind of relax. It's like I'm already doing that pretty dang well. Um, so those are just a couple of really cool numbers. Um, one of the ones that I also like to use is birdie conversion rate. Just kind of tells you how good you are at making birdie when you hit the green. It's not super important until you're in the low 70s on average But really valuable stuff. The next one that I want to go to is penalty rate here. It doesn't want to give me the— because I didn't define a point here. Let's just go ahead and— there we are. So penalty rate is huge. That tells you how often you're in a position where you're not going to be— or where you've hit it out of bounds, you've cost yourself a shot or 2 shots. Keeping track of that number is way more important than keeping track of fairways hit. Fairways hit is almost irrelevant, but keeping track of not hitting it out of bounds or recovery rate, not hitting in the trees, super, super valuable. So those are numbers you definitely want to stay looking at. Um, let's go ahead and see here. The other ones that I want to share with you guys are Let's see here. So with putting, what we want to look at is first and foremost, we want to really be paying attention to 3-putt rate. That's going to be the most important thing for most junior golfers, is 3-putt way too often. And that's really, uh, you know, has two legs to it. You have your short putts, kind of inside 5 feet, and then you have your longer putts. You have, you know, the putts that are, you know, outside of, let's say, 20 feet. And so a couple good numbers to be able to reference there I will start with over 21 feet because that's going to be all your lag putts. You get a bunch of greens, you're going to be lag putting a lot. And so the ones to look at there, obviously, you know, 3-putt rate's great, but to dig a little bit deeper here is really understand like what's the second putt distance. So if we look at, you know, from 50 feet, we're doing a pretty good job at, you know, a foot. Um, 45 to 50 feet, 8 feet. Um, you know, 40 to 45 feet, 2 feet. That's pretty dang good. 35, 40 feet, 4.5 feet. And what this does is twofold. Number one, it kind of gives you a little bit of expectation if you're the player and be like, okay, well, if I hit myself to the spot, I'm probably on average going to be about here. It also helps you understand your distribution a little bit better. So if you have a 2-foot average, then you know that your distribution pattern is going to be probably about 4 feet, you know, taking your average there, long and short. And that really just helps you understand, like, here's where my targeting should be. Am I trying to stop the ball in the hole? Am I trying to hit it 2 feet past the hole? Um, but it also helps you understand, well, how good is your short putting have to be? And so that's kind of the other side of, um, of that stool here. Looks like we've got to, uh, go back into our short putting here. Let's go ahead and pull that up. All right, so then with our short putting, it's a little bit of different side of that coin. You want to look at make rates because first part, we're just trying to get close. Second part, we're trying to make this. And so you can really look at, you know, for me, if I were trying to say how do I 3-putt less often, I probably need to make more 4-footers. And you know, if I can make more outside of 4 feet, you know, in 5 feet, that would be great too. But really, these 4-footers are pretty much the reason why I'm going to 3-putt, you know, the majority of time when I do 3-putt. So that's how you really want to use the putting numbers there. And then I'll share 2 other numbers with you guys because I thought this was really, really cool that they just added. Is when you go into short game, it's really easy to look at scrambling and say, oh well, it's, you know, my general scrambling is this, but it doesn't really tell you that much information versus if you know what your scrambling is by yardage, right? So if I only miss the green by 10 yards, how often do I get up and down? That's a little bit more interesting. So for me, um, so far over these last 10 rounds, if I'm inside 10 yards, I missed the green I'm getting up and down every single time. If I am, you know, 10 to 20 yards, even, you know, still at 20-yard range, you know, I could be 15 yards off, off the, um, away from the pin, I'm still going to get that up and down a pretty decent percentage of the time as compared to my average. So I can be really mindful about that when I'm picking out my approach shots. Not just, okay, I want to hit the green, yes, but also what gives me the highest probability of if I I don't hit the green gives me a really good chance to get up and down, puts me in a really good spot. So that's, that's really useful there and something to keep track of. And then the last one here that I'll share with you guys is, is their approach numbers, because a lot of the time, you know, players look at their approach shots and they say, oh, I don't, you know, don't hit enough greens, or, you know, I don't hit it close enough. But they don't necessarily know what to do with that. They just go and like hit the same shot over and over and over again, or they kind of work on scoring clubs. But the way that I like to approach this is to look at the player and say, well, what's their on-green percentage from these different distances? Where does that drop below where they should be for that distance based on their own game? If they're trying to get to 70% greens regulation, well, for me, obviously I probably need to do a little bit better job from 100 to 125 yards. I need to break out those numbers, and then I can use this in my practice to say, okay, well, I want to beat those numbers in practice, um, and make sure I'm moving in in the right direction there. So that's really just a few of the statistics I really like to look at within Circles. And hopefully this gives you a better sense of number one, how to use the tool, this tool exists, and really how you can use it to help your junior golfer improve. Now I haven't touched at all on tournaments versus practice. If you guys want me to do that in the future, you can go ahead and comment below and I can kind of dig into that. But that's just a little Easter egg that I'll throw in there just to say, You know, if your junior golfer is in a position where they're playing a lot better in practice than in tournaments, one of the things that you can very easily do is have them— if they're tracking them both, what you can find is the difference between those. When we look through all these different numbers and really say, okay, here's the thing that breaks down for, for this particular player. And then you can really dig into the nuances of why that's necessarily happening. But that's a little bit bigger scope for another video. But I hope this video was helpful for you guys to just understand how to use the tool and how to really help your junior golfer progress in their game by using statistics.