Golf ScoutHow to track your golf shots
Start with five numbers per hole: score, putts, fairway hit, green in regulation and penalties. To go further, record every shot's distance from the hole, its lie and the club, plus where it finished. That's enough to work out your real club distances and strokes gained, on a paper card or with a GPS app that marks each shot for you.
Level 1: five numbers a hole
These fit on any scorecard and take seconds to note:
| Record | How | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Score | Strokes on the hole | Where your round went |
| Putts | Strokes on the green | Three-putts, and how often you get up and down |
| Fairway | Hit, left or right (par 4s and 5s) | Your miss off the tee |
| Green in regulation | On the green in par minus 2: one shot on a par 3, two on a par 4, three on a par 5 | How good your approach play is |
| Penalties | Penalty strokes | Which holes and shots cost you most |
Writing left or right for a missed fairway is worth the extra second: a pattern of misses on one side is much more useful than a percentage.
Two more are easy to add: up and down (when you miss the green, did you get down in two?) and the club off the tee.
Level 2: every shot
Scorecard stats have a weakness. Putts per round, for example, mixes up putting with how close you hit your approaches: Mark Broadie showed tour players who took fewer putts than average but putted worse. To see what each shot was worth, you need more about each one:
- Distance to the hole before the shot: yards, or feet on the green.
- Lie: tee, fairway, rough, sand, trees or green.
- Club.
- Where it finished, which is the next shot's starting point, and any penalty.
With that, every shot gets a strokes gained value. A golfer off 18 who hits a 160-yard approach from the fairway to 25 feet takes it from 4.08 expected strokes to 2.26, a gain of 0.82 against golfers of the same handicap. Over a few rounds, the totals for driving, approach, short game and putting show where your strokes go. The same records give you your real distance with each club, so you choose clubs by what you actually hit.
On paper
A simple method that works on any course:
- Use a notebook or the back of the card, one line per shot: hole, club, distance before, lie, result.
- Take the distance from a course planner, a yardage book or a GPS. For a putt, estimate in feet, or pace it off: a common rule of thumb is that one long stride is about a yard, or 3 feet.
- After the round, enter each hole into the strokes gained calculator.
It's thorough but slow, so you might do it for a few rounds at a time rather than every week.
With an app
A GPS app does the measuring: you mark where each shot is played from, and the distances come from the map. Golf Scout, for example, marks a shot in one tap on the iPhone, on Apple Watch or from the Lock Screen without unlocking. Each mark fills in where the previous shot finished, and putts come from the scorecard. After the round, the review puts every shot on the hole map, where you can add a missed shot, move one, or set its club, lie and penalty. Its free scorecard keeps fairways, greens in regulation, putts and penalties.
Whichever way you record, do it as you go. It's easy to forget a shot or two when you fill them in from memory at the end.
Is it allowed in competitions?
Yes. The Rules of Golf let you record playing information during a round for use afterwards, and use information from previous rounds. You can get distance and direction information from a device unless the competition has a local rule banning it. What you can't do during the round is have a device process or interpret your data, such as suggesting a club or line of play, or measure elevation changes.
What to do with your numbers
- After five rounds or so, look for the biggest loss. Strokes gained by category makes this easy; with Level 1 stats, compare your fairways, greens and putts with your scores.
- Pick one thing to practise, not five.
- Check your average distance with each club against the club distance chart, and set up your bag with the gapping calculator.
For putting and approach play in detail, see strokes gained putting and strokes gained approach.
Try the strokes gained calculator
Related guides
- Strokes gained approach: how good are your approach shots?
- Strokes gained putting: how good is your putting really?
- Strokes gained explained
Sources
Golf Scout marks each shot in one tap on iPhone, on Apple Watch or from the Lock Screen, fills in where it finished from your next mark, and shows every shot on the hole map after the round. Get Golf Scout on the App Store, free for iPhone and Apple Watch.