THE DATA EXPERT
LOU STAGNER
A self-confessed “golf nut and data nerd,” 2-handicapper Lou joined Arccos in 2021 from a background in business intelligence and analytics. Alongside his work with the shot-tracking giants, he has gained a legion of followers through his lively Twitter feed @loustagner and the Hack it Out podcast he co-hosts.
What do two-thirds of a billion amateur golf shots tell us about the way we play golf? Pretty much everything. I could give you the success rate of 10-handicappers attacking front-right pins from 175 yards in the right-hand rough; or of 20-handicappers driving the green on par-4s over 325 yards (actually you can probably work that one out yourself). But underpinning almost every stat we care to pull up is a clear and important theme: we golfers have a poor understanding of our games, both in terms of what we think we ought to be doing, and what we actually are doing – and it is harming our performance.
To explain how we know this, we need to talk briefly about the Strokes Gained metric devised by Dr Mark Broadie, and which has been part of the Arccos platform since 2020.
In Strokes Gained, every shot you hit is compared to an average or typical result for a golfer of your ability to give it a value – a positive gain if the result is better than the average, or a negative loss if it is worse.
Thanks to the immense number of shots recorded on the Arccos system across all handicap ranges, we have a pretty robust picture of what those averages look like. Picture, for example, a 15-handicapper, 150 yards from the green in the fairway. Their shot comes up short, ending up on the apron some 19 yards from the hole. That might not seem like a great effort, but the data tells us it’s bang on the average: with that shot, this golfer is doing neither worse nor better than they ought to do.
Indeed, the averages collated
