The PGA Tour organizes the main professional golf tours, leading the world competitions and industry trends. PGA Tour is collecting near real time metrics of the tour rounds and is ranking the players in five important categories: Off the Tee, Approach the green, Around the green, Putting and Scoring.  As every player would like to be compared with the bests the key issue is how to automate the collection of these statistic data to other professionals and amateur players.

Our initial approach in TRUESHOT was to identify the main PGA statistics that can provide the player’s performance details based on a manual classification model (relying on golfer’s memory to input data after a round). At the end of 2015, Trueshot AnalysisPro (Golf Analysis Tool) was improved with a first set of PGA Statistics. Four categories were considered on game statistics, as presented in the example below from a scratch player round:

The idea is to enhance the performance of the players, by motivating them to push their game data and obtaining statistics comparable with PGA players. These four categories were produced as following:

• On off the tee: the “Drive Accuracy” is determined by the number of good or excellent “drives” corresponding to fairway hits (the higher, the better).
• On the Approach the green: the “Green in Regulation” (GIR) counts the number of non-putting strokes with respect to the hole’s par number. Also, the “Proximity to hole” make as estimative of the average distance to the flagstick based on the number of short and long putts performed.
• On the Around the green: the “Scrambling” counts the holes where the player was able to recover for a non-GIR and reach a “par” or better (the higher, the better).
• On Putting: “Average Putting” and “Putts per round” are the traditional statistics complemented with “One Putt percentage” and the “3-putt avoidance”.

Most of these statistics relies on the scorecard with putting information but manual input is troublesome and more metrics are needed. Thus, our next steps look for automation using the Auto-tracking Wristband. The wristband aims to automatically detect the type of swing and acquired the shot positioning allowing to generate statistics with a minimal human intervention. Recording different types of swing are now being performed.

Wristband swing recording with Rui Indio @ Montado Golf Course