My 2024 Golf Summary
Heads up: long post. I'm a very high handicapper, so please don't be too mean lol.
Last year, I saw a post from someone who made some golf goals and I thought that would be a fun challenge for myself. I set some goals and played golf more this past year than I ever had before. I love a good spreadsheet, so I ended up making one that evolved over the year to track my progress.
For background, I learned to golf as a kid, didn't really play for almost 10 years, then started to get back into it towards the end of college; it was incredible how terrible I was by then. I've played somewhat inconsistently since then (~5 years), very slowly improving. I broke 100 for the first time in March of 2023 (99), but only that one time all year.
First up my goals and how I did:
Average score per round: I think this was a good goal and I just barely missed due to some absolutely awful rounds early in the year. In order to compare across all courses, I adjusted scores on courses that were not par 72 by dividing my score by the course par and multiplying by 72. I tried a couple different ways of adjusting and that was the best I came up with, but I may play around with it some more this year.
Pars or better per round: This one was probably a little ambitious. I think I'll set the same goal next year. Also I say "par or better," but I only had one birdie all year and it was on the very first hole of the very first course I played haha.
Putts per round/hole: honestly surprised I came so close on this one; definitely looking to get under 2 putts per hole this year.
Chips per round/hole: chipping is the worst part of my game and it was a focus this year. I'm glad I hit this goal, even as low as I set the bar, and I'll definitely be setting a higher bar this time around.
Typical drive: I track shots with an app. By "typical drive," I'm removing mishits and shots with any big mitigating or helpful factors (big elevation drops, etc). I actually think I did okay on this one. I only have it set up to take my last three rounds into account and my distances dipped with the colder weather. I started the year around 210-215 and I had a quite a few rounds over my goal in the summer and early fall.
Handicap: I manually calculated this with the formula I found online. One big note here is I included incomplete rounds by extrapolating a score based on the number of holes I played and how far over par I was. I know it's both imperfect and unofficial, but I'm not using this handicap for anything except my own self-improvement and I wanted to see that manifest. I also included every round, i.e. no practice rounds, for the same reason. 30 was probably a bit too easy of a goal, I'm left debating if 25 is too easy of a goal for next year, no chance I can get down to 20 though.
Best round of the year: Really proud of this one; I thought I had no chance a few months into the year. Just snuck under 95 in the fall after having a 99, 96, and 95 over the summer and being on pace one other time, but having to leave early. This was not adjusted per par 72 (although I excluded a par 3 course obviously) although my 94 was on a par 72 course anyway. This is another one I'm unsure on for next year. Break 90 feels crazy in another year, but break 92 or something feels silly.
Number of times I practiced or played per week on average: I was shooting for 3 out of every 4 weeks and I crushed that one haha. I'm definitely going to be busier this year, so I won't be going up from my actual this past year. Probably will shoot to average once a week. I will mention that the driving range before a round didn't count.
I added a backlog of rounds before 2024 with what information I had in order to calculate a pretty realistic handicap right away instead of having to use fewer rounds out of the total. I could have worked that into the formula, but it would have made it annoyingly long. The handicaps denoted with a "*" at the beginning of the year are handicaps based on the top 8 of less than 20 rounds. About half of this was manual entry and half is calculated from the manual entry. For any excel nerds, I made a table in a separate tab that I will enter all new rounds into and then they get pulled onto the tab for the current year based on the date.
Not much here. I do pretty much always at least putt in addition to range balls. Like I said above, I really tried to focus on chipping this year, so I spent a lot of time around chipping greens when possible, but not every range I go to has one.
I didn't nearly track every shot this year, but anytime I wasn't feeling rushed and hit a ball reasonably, I did my best to track it with my app to get some distances that are as accurate as possible for someone at my level. I calculated a range from the "Low" to "High" based on 1.5 standard deviations (last column). If my shots can be assumed to fall in a normal distribution (I have no idea if they do), this should theoretically catch over 85% of them. I enter club, date, and distance of every shot I track into another separate tab and which has it's own table calculating the same things, but for shots within a year of whatever the current date is instead of for a particular calendar year. You'll notice I have two drivers listed. In typical r/golf fashion, I bought a driver with a stiffer shaft (previous was regular stiffness) off of FB marketplace at the urging of a 3 handicap friend about halfway through the year. As you can see, it made little difference in distance and I didn't see much difference in shots in play either.
I had a lot of fun making this and would be open to sharing a template if anyone else would like to use it. Potential additions I'm thinking about are fairway%, GIR%, up and downs, birdies (lol), bogeys (since I'm chasing bogey golf now), and penalties.
I've been busy after the holidays, so I haven't gotten out to play yet this year and also haven't decided on my golf goals for this year, but hopefully both of those things happen soon.