The first came in the 1990s as a junior golfer. He took lessons, played on his high school team, and took it pretty seriously. But then, as happens to so many, life took over. His focus shifted to his career — now, he spends his days as the Head of Business Strategy and Analytics at Amazon Prime Gaming — and as Hutch puts it, before you know it, “20 years golf in the way.”

It was only the rise of golf’s fledgling analytics scene over the past 10 years that sparked Hutch’s love for the game once again.

Led by the likes of analytics guru Mark Broadie and his 2014 book “Every Shot Counts”, suddenly a new crop of voices were presenting golf in a fascinating new way that made sense to Hutch, an analytical, self-proclaimed data nerd.

“As somebody who manages data science and analytics teams in my day job, I just became fascinated by the idea that I could quantify and measure my progress in a way that wasn’t possible when I took up the game,” he says. “I think I just realised that I actually could get better.”

Then, in 2021, the spark became an inferno. During a buddies trip to the Monterey Peninsula, Hutch — then a 10 handicap — birdied three of his first four holes at The Links at Spanish Bay. “That was it,” he said, “I was hooked.”

Inspired by the @chasingscratch0 season finale and the exciting TW news, I created this 6 month retro of my journey back into golf.

Huge thanks to my ever-expanding virtual team of coaches, thinkers and fellow hackers who continue to inspire me with ways to improve. Credits pic.twitter.com/y64uc9aqtc

— Hutch?‍? (@hutch_golf) November 21, 2021

He went all-in on improving his game. A year-and-a-half later, his handicap index was all the way down to a 1.1. Hutchinson often tweets about his progress and keeps an interesting newsletter as he journeys toward his ultimate goal of a scratch handicap.

With the off-season presenting an opportunity for the rest of us to reflect on our own games — and how we might be able to improve them — Hutch and I exchanged some messages about the various things he’s learned along the way.

1. Do something useful every day

Committing to getting better at golf doesn’t require one decision. It requires lots of little ones. It requires playing the long game: integrating good habits into your daily or weekly routine that will improve your game.
“I realised that all I had to do was put in some consistent effort, and there was a good chance that if I kept going I’d see some actual results,” he says.
For Hutch, that took two forms: The physical, and the mental.
Hutch used to do Crossfit up to five times a week, but realising that his hard work wasn’t translating to golf, he worked with a trainer, began using the Fit For Golf app, and The Stack speed training aid to create a more golf-specific programme.
“I have a 20-minute daily movement practice of yoga and mobility work, and work on strength and power 2-3 days a week, which includes direct speed training with the Stack System,” he says. “This has helped me avoid injury and keeps my swing feeling relatively strong and stable from day to day.”
On the mental side he turned to another app, the “FitMind App” and started what he calls a “mindfulness routine,” which helped him both on and off the course.
“It’s essentially spending 10 minutes finding something to focus my mind on like my breath, and when that attention wanders, gently redirecting it back to the present. That’s it. Just building that muscle. Then, when I’m on the course and the mind starts to wander, I can refocus on something in the present like the wind, sounds, or my breath, and redirect that focus back to the task at hand.”

2. Track your stats

One of the reasons why golf shifted onto the back-burner for Hutch was because his insatiable thirst for more data about his own game couldn’t be matched by the stat-tracking apps at the time. He would track basic statistics like fairways hit, never quite sure how it correlated with his score.
Fast-forward to the present, and we arrive at Hutch’s second piece of advice.

Learning to play poorly and not let it ruin your day or negatively impact your playing partners is a skill I’ve been working on, and I definitely feel good about the progress I’ve made.

— Hutch?‍? (@hutch_golf) October 1, 2022

“My advice to any golfer is that if they’re serious about improvement, they should be tracking strokes gained,” he says. Arccos, GolfMetrics, SwingU, ShotScope, V1, Decade are all apps that Hutch mentions, eventually settling on Arccos. “They all have great features and trade-offs that will matter more to some golfers than others.”
For Hutch, the biggest change this led to was in his greens in regulation statistic — one of areas the strokes gained stats revealed he had the most room to improve. Noticing he was losing strokes with his irons, he realised it wasn’t simply due to the occasional mis-hit. A large part was simply aiming at too many pins.
“Learning correct target selection and how to optimise for GIR instead of just flag hunting,” he said. “This led to a lot more easy pars and somewhat counter-intuitively, a lot more birdies.”
Getting diligent about tracking your own statistics isn’t the sexiest solution in the world, but it is perhaps the best one. You’ll quickly start seeing trends emerge, and will highlight the areas you need to focus on the most.

3. Focus your practice

Believe it or not, you don’t need to practise all the time to improve your game (though, admittedly, it would help). But if you have aspirations to improve, you do need to practise smarter with the time you do have.
“At the start my practice was what Chasing Scratch fans would call the ‘suicide method’,” Hutch said. “I’d go onto the range and spray 100 balls, trying all manner of swing tips, sampling a bit from each soda fountain just hoping to find something.”
Hutch recommends finding a coach and committing to an improvement plan you believe in. In his case, Hutch would struggle hitting shots both left and right, with the occasional “chunk and thin” contact error thrown in. The cause for these inconsistencies, he found, was a pronounced side-to-side slide of his hips on the backswing.

Okay, if I did the math right (it’s been a while since geometry), it looks like the error tolerance is about 2.77° (or a miss of 1.385° right or left).

Feel free to check my work though.
Base = 2.32” (space the ball has to go through without hitting either side)
Legs = 48”

— Hutch?‍? (@hutch_golf) July 10, 2022

“The two things we’ve worked on are related to improving ground strike and face strike consistency. We did this by addressing lateral movement in the backswing and early extension through impact.”
Hutch knew exactly what he needed to work on each time he arrived at the range. He’d dedicate portions of each range session to different things: Sometimes, it’d be technical work, focusing on drills and making technique changes without fear of the result. Other times, the opposite. His only focus was on hitting golf shots, without worrying about the swing stuff.
And slowly but surely, his scores started to drop. Hutch still has work to achieve his ultimate goal of sustaining a scratch handicap, but if he keeps walking down the road that got him this far, he knows what lies at the end.
“My approach isn’t going to work for everyone, especially those with an aversion to the analytical,” he says. “It definitely gets harder from here but I learn every round there’s still plenty of room to improve.”

The post This golfer went from a 10 handicap to a 1 in less than two years — here’s how appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

This bold statement isn’t originally mine. I was having an email exchange with former USGA Senior Technical Director Dick Rugge, when listening to the recent Hot List podcast. When there was a suggestion that golfers really haven’t improved despite all the advances in technology, Rugge, who often talked about the subject of handicap trends during his tenure at the USGA, told me about some handicap data that suggested just the opposite.

A quick call to the USGA confirmed that very fact. In the last 25 years, the average USGA handicap for a man has improved nearly two full strokes, from 16.3 to 14.4. For women, the improvement is no less impressive, dropping from 29.7 in 1991 to 26.1 in 2016.

Rugge called the 12 percent improvement in golf the equivalent of “the average 100 meter dash time for high school and college runners dropping a full second” or “the average 1500 meter time of high school and college runners dropping about 30 seconds,” or “the average batting average in baseball going up about 30 points.”

None of those things have happened, of course. Even if you look at more recreational pursuits like running a marathon, golf’s numbers look no less dramatic. For instance, the average qualifying time to get you a spot in the Boston Marathon as a 45-year-old man is exactly the same today as it was in 1990—3 hours, 25 minutes.

In fact, average golfers are getting better than PGA Tour players, too. PGA Tour scoring average (actual) in 1991 was 71.50. It improved to 71.12 in 2016. That amounts to just a 0.5 percent improvement.

Why are golfers getting better? It certainly seems a reasonable suggestion that a key contributor to making average golfers better is the fundamental changes in equipment technology over the last two decades. Go hit some tee shots with a 1990 TaylorMade Burner or try to find a decent hybrid from the first Bush Administration. Quite simply, it’s easier to get the first shot up in the air and in play today than it was 25 years ago. And it’s also easier to hit longer shots from the rough or fairway than it was in the days of 2-irons and steel-shafted persimmon 5-woods.

Mind you, the game hasn’t become easy. The short game is still challenging and increasing green speeds make getting the ball in the hole without three-putting at least twice a round a near miraculous performance for an average player.

In truth, it may not be the case that golfers have even developed better skills in concert with their lowered scores over the last quarter century. Again, equipment has allowed some of the more marginal swings to be rewarded with playable results.

But consider that golf courses aren’t getting any easier and old tracks aren’t being renovated to make them shorter and less of a challenge, and still handicaps are trending down. With everything from agronomy enhancements to work-life balance cutting into practice and play time, the deck is stacked against golfers getting better. And yet the numbers say we’re all shooting more lower scores than ever before.

With all the technological benefits being thrown our way, it really calls into question the anti-golf argument that the game is too hard. There simply are more ways to get competent at golf than ever before. That list includes better clubs and balls, of course, but it also includes better diagnostic tools to help golfers improve their swings and get into the right clubs and balls for their games.

So the next time you start surfing through the Hot List, consider this: It’s not just new toys you might be buying, it’s lower scores.

The post A Closer Look At Handicap Data Shows Just How Much Golfers Have Improved In Recent Years appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.