How do you miss greens?

The fastest way to play better golf is to hit more greens. Greens in regulation is one of the few traditional golf stats that correlates directly to score, so how do we hit more greens?

The first step is to use an app like TANGENT Golf to start tracking your game. It does all the hard work of shot tracking automatically and in the background so that you can focus on golf. It’s difficult to improve if you can’t measure. So step one is to measure. You might just see something like below:

Regardless of skill level, the overwhelming tendency is to miss short of the target. However, you can see that as skill level increases more shots get ‘pin high’. Why is missing short bad? Well… it isn’t always, but the vast majority of golf courses position hazards in front of the green whether it be bunkers, creeks, or ponds… missing short means lack of distance control and lack of distance control is a problem. There will certainly be situations where favoring a short miss is strategically the best play, but over time you do not want to see an overwhelming tendency in any direction, particularly short.

Why are we missing so many greens short?

There are many potential reasons for missing greens short and TANGENT can help us find out which root cause is ours so that we can work on the right things to improve. Here are the most common reasons for missing greens short:

1. Overestimating how far you hit your clubs

2. Poor strike

3. Aiming at the flag

4. Playing tees that are too long for your skill level

Let’s address how you would know where you stand for each one and what you can do to improve.

How far do you truly hit your clubs?

If I were to ask you how far you hit a 7 iron, I would be willing to bet that the number you give me is not an average, its not a median, its much more likely to be the distance the ball goes when you flush it. I’m just as guilty. When someone asks me how far I hit a 7 iron, I’m likely to say 175 yards…

But the question was how far do you hit the 7 iron?
And not, how far can you hit the 7 iron.

So how often do I hit a 7 iron 175 yards on the course? Not all that often. 175 yards is a center strike 7 iron where just about everything goes right. I am scratch handicap, how often do you think I have an absolutely perfect strike? 9 out of 10?…

Not a chance. It’s probably less than 30% of the time.

Does that mean the other 70% are awful golf shots? No… but even missing the center by a few millimeters… or catching it ever so slightly heavy… means less ball speed, less distance, and not hitting it 175 yards.

So we need to start thinking about this a little differently, luckily TANGENT takes care of a lot of that for us. It measures every shot to give true dispersions, and for me, a median 7 iron goes closer to 167 yards. That is an 8 yard difference!!!

So if I use my 7 iron as the go to for a 175 yard par 3, look at how my dispersion overlays with the hole. A good portion of shots are short of the hole. How many are long? Just 2.

In this case, my entire shot pattern has a bias short of the hole. By simply taking one more club I can shift the dispersion up and have a better chance of hitting the green.

The main point here is that you can’t use you’re flushed number as the number for a club. Even the pros don’t perfectly flush it every time. You have to plan for that slight mishit… and the few times you flush it… You’re more likely to be on the back of the green and still putting than you are wildly over the green. I’ll take putting every time.

The beauty of TANGENT is unlike these hacked together plots for this newsletter, TANGENT will show you your dispersions overlayed on the hole with a simple tap on the map. So now you can see your personalized dispersions overlaid on the target to make confident decisions on the club that maximizes your chances of getting on the green.

Poor Strike Quality

Hopefully by now you have admitted to yourself that the distances in your head for your clubs don’t account for mishits. So what if we were to count mishits? And should you?

The next time you are on a driving range or hitting bay, do me a favor… hit 10 balls with your favorite club and count how many out of 10 were flushed. Perfect strikes. When you’re disappointed by that number, take a deep breath. The pros don’t hit it perfect either. It’s about improving the quality of the misses and taking them to account for target and club selection (something that TANGENT can do for you with the AI Caddie). You’ll preferably want to do this on real grass as mats can cover up heavy shots as they don’t slow the club down the same way as grass.

Now I’m not saying to count that stone cold hosel rocket or the ball you laid the sod over. You can and should remove total outliers (TANGENT does the same), but you should be counting the ball that was slightly toward the toe or slightly fat / thin. Those shots happen all the time on the golf course, in fact… They happen much more frequently than in our little range experiment. On the course you have weird lies, uneven stances, more irregularities that lead to more mis-strikes. So you want to account for those misses. Thats why they call golf a game of misses! It’s not just missing your target, it’s also missing your strike.

So how do we get our 7 iron closer to that 175 number? We start improving our strike. The closer we can consistently hit the center of the face with good turf interaction the more our distance will move towards our flushed number. And in order to improve our strike, we need to improve our skill of being able to detect what happened at impact.

State of the art launch monitors can do it for us. You take a swing and good radar based system or camera systems will tell you exactly how many millimeters you missed the center by both vertically and horizontally. They might even tell you turf interaction, but most of us don’t have immediate access to a 20 thousand dollar launch monitor… Nor are we going to take that machine on the course with us and set it up for every shot. Therefore, building the skill of using the feedback in your hands, ears, and the divot will allow you to know how you hit the ball without fancy launch monitors.

For that, I recommend the TANGENT Golf app and doing the Impact and Divot drills. With just a can of foot spray or some impact tape, you can quickly learn your tendency for miss hits. For example, I struggle with low point control (fat versus thin), biased towards thin strikes. Then horizontally I am strongly biased towards the toe. The ball almost never sees the heel of my golf clubs.

Once you learn the skill, you can quickly track strike quality for any shot on the golf course. I tend to focus on tracking my misses versus my center strikes. I want to know where I miss when things go wrong, and then assume everything else was a good strike, but the reason I can do this on the golf course is because I have built the skill of using that feedback to know what happened on the club face.

I talked about routines in a previous newsletter, and one of your post shot routines should be to look at the face to identify where the ball hit, look at the divot, and either make mental notes or track in TANGENT what happened. This will treat your brain to associate the feeling of impact with what happened so that you can automatically detect a toe strike for example.

One helpful tip for this…. It helps to have clean golf clubs. If your clubs are clean, its pretty easy to look at them after a shot and see where the ball hit. If you haven’t cleaned your clubs in weeks… you’ll see all kinds of dirt and strikes scattered across the face. My favorite way to keep clubs clean… The Groove It golf brush. I prefer the big one that you can fill with water and easily spritz a club, but the mini is super solid. It is the best way to quickly clean your clubs and in Texas when it gets hot… spit can be hard to come by. I didn’t think there was much room for innovation in the brush space, but I loved it enough that we reached out to them to work together. You won’t be disappointed. The magnetic connection is clutch. Way better than those long cords that get tangled and break. Get 10% off a brush with TANGENT10 or by using the links in this newsletter.

In addition to working on detecting strike quality while you play, the Impact and Divot drills in the TANGENT app are clutch. You’ll learn the skill fast and I promise it will pay off with your ball striking.

A fun game I like to play when doing the drill…. Hit the ball, guess where you think it struck the club face, then look and see if you got it right. When you start guessing right every time, you no longer need the foot spray or impact tape.

Quit aiming at the flag

I understand… The goal is to get it in the hole, so why wouldn’t you aim at the hole? Well… because we’re shooting shotguns, not rifles. Your golf shot has a spray pattern and if you aim at a front pin you will miss short even more often than normal.

In fact, even pros fall into this trap. Professional golfers have the lowest Green in Regulation percentage for front pins. Don’t fall into that trap. Bias towards the fat part of the green and you’ll hit more of them. Putting is almost ALWAYS better than chipping.

Just take a look at this example below with a front pin. If you use the pin distance as your target, almost 75% of the shot distribution is short of the green. Contrast that with the right image where the aim point is biased 10 yards past the pin and slightly left (towards the center). All of the sudden most of the shots are on the GREEN and few are short.

This is why GPS based systems like TANGENT tend to be better for scoring than a laser rangefinder alone. Know where the center of the green is and bias your targets towards the center, particularly for distance control. A longer putt is better than a chip almost every single time.

Are you playing the right tees?

I covered this in a previous newsletter, so I’ll just link it below rather than covering it again, but if you’re playing tees that are too long for you, then you’ll have longer clubs in. Longer clubs make strike quality, aim, and everything harder, which means missing more greens short. Move up a box. It’s more fun, you’ll hit more greens, and you’ll stop missing so many short. If you want more info on that, click the link below.

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