New Toy: Now What?

For the past four seasons, I've been using my Shot Scope watch and absolutely love it. It's given me a ton of useful information, and I'll still be using it every round, but I love looking at my golf data. And I want even more. So, I picked up a Garmin R10 launch monitor.

My Shot Scope data tells me a lot, but for distances, it just gives you the total distance. For a lot of golfers out there, that's more than enough. But I really want to know my carry distances (how far the ball travels in the air) with my clubs. Having that number gives a golfer extra confidence when picking a club to get you over a bunker, or some water, between you and where you want the ball to land.

But, I spent the money on this thing to really help me out so I'm planning to use it for more than just simple carry distance numbers. Lucky for me, shortly after this arrived in the mail I happened to listen to a great episode from the guys at Hack it Out called "Dialing in Your Distance Control." I highly suggest you give that episode a listen. Even if you don't have access to a launch monitor, there's plenty in there to help you think a little differently about shot selection that might help you to save a shot or two.

I won't get too much into what they talk about in the episode, but it did give me a few ideas. On top of getting carry distance and dispersion data for my stock shots, they also suggested looking into distances for "soft" shots and things like 3/4 swings. I already planned on doing that with my wedges since I hardly ever hit a full swing with them but doing so for every club in the bag could help me feel a bit better when walking up to some of those uncomfortable in-between-clubs distances if I know I have a shot to get me there.

One other additional thing they brought up was comparing your distances in different temperatures. Living in Canada, this is something that comes into play quite often - the first few days if the golf season have not been great here. There are plenty of cold days and plenty of hot ones. Hell, there are plenty of rounds that start one way and end the other. So I'll be trying to keep track of things like that as well.

So far I've got out to range once with it, but the 50 km/hr winds didn't really make those numbers super useful... I don't think I'll be hitting too many 195 yard 9 irons this year.

If you have read my post about course management through video games, you've heard my talk about the My Strategy feature From Shot Scope. I can't wait to use that disperssion data from my launch monitorr with this feature and plan out some solid new targets for the year.

And, in other news, I've partnered up Shot Scope and their ambassador program! I've been talking about how much I've enjoyed my watch and their dashboard from the start of my journey so if you ever want to give them a shot, use my code DROPPINSTROKES for 15% off (not including ex-display models).

Check in soon for an update on what new things I'll inevitably learn I need to work on after playing around with my launch monitor.