By Peter Sanders with Max Adler
May 2008
When I started keeping my stats, I'd been playing golf for only a year. I was over-whelmed: It seemed like every facet of my game needed improvement. I'm by no means a number cruncher, but because I've played a lot of endurance sports (swimming, running, triathlons), which are all about mechan-ical efficiency, using stats to narrow my searchlight made sense. It's great being able to tell an instructor exactly what you want to work on. For me, it was distance control on sand shots. We reviewed the basics to reduce my percentage of errors (shots that miss the green), then worked on using both my gap and pitching wedges, even my 9-iron, to achieve varied distances with the same mechanics. Sand stats are volatile because there are usually few opportunities per round, but tracking them was fun and kept me focused.
