Amateur driving distances decreasing

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duncan mackie

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On a personal note I know I have dropped my own driving average about 20-30 yards in the past 5 years due to an ageing body. (and 10-15 yards for irons).

Apparently you can get that back with the right shards, new irons and a change in ball.....🤗

Failing that a move to Denver maybe?
 

Fade and Die

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This would be a significant factor in my opinion.

Similar issues have existed with average handicap stats over the decade's, and stats such as 90% of golfers will never break 100...

I completely agree that a hugenpercentage of people who play golf have no realistic understanding of their average carry distance with most of their clubs (massively overestimating) but that's another matter entirely!


This is the main problem i think. We just got back from 3 days at St Pierres, every afternoon we sat on the terrace watching golfers play the 18th on the Old Course, a 220 Yard Par 3, We saw maybe 1 in 10 make the green, or have the distance but not the accuracy, most were well short and most had used a driver.
 

jim8flog

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Apparently you can get that back with the right shards, new irons and a change in ball.....珞

Failing that a move to Denver maybe?

I have found that playing in shorts and a polo shirt has given me massive gains over playing in trousers, long johns, a tee shirt, a long sleeve polo, a jumper and a waterproof jacket.
 

HomerJSimpson

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For my tuppence worth its a drawback of these systems like Arcoss and Game Golf which give you averages on how far you hit clubs. A topped drive going 15 yards into deep grass is going to need a lot of 260+ drives to compensate and get the average back to the 220-235 yards I usually hit my driver. For me, FIR is far more important. Even then, on longer holes I am not getting home on some par 4's and so that then skews the GIR numbers and in particular the GIR after hitting FIR number.
 

Papas1982

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For my tuppence worth its a drawback of these systems like Arcoss and Game Golf which give you averages on how far you hit clubs. A topped drive going 15 yards into deep grass is going to need a lot of 260+ drives to compensate and get the average back to the 220-235 yards I usually hit my driver. For me, FIR is far more important. Even then, on longer holes I am not getting home on some par 4's and so that then skews the GIR numbers and in particular the GIR after hitting FIR number.

These systems account for the mi***** after a certain amount of time by using the middle 75th percentile of distances.
 

Capella

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I agree with what others have suggested. The loss in distance most likely comes from a change in the demographic that uses Arccos. In the beginning it was only available as a standalone tracking system (and for a long time only for iPhone), which would suggest that mostly better/more experienced golfers who take a deeper interest in their performance used it (actually, in the very beginning, it will have been a lot of product testers who got it for free and used it, and since they tend to be pros or very low handicapped amateurs, that would skew the numbers somewhat).

Through the partnership with Cobra and their CobraConnect system, starting with the driver last year and extending to the full set this year, more and more average players will have used it. My guess is that if you compared the same subset of let's say 5000 players who have been using the system from the beginning and compare their numbers from 2015 to the current ones, there should not be much difference. So the headline should not be "amateur driving distance decreasing", but rather "even bad players use Arccos now" (hell, even I use it and I am bad enough to ruin every statistic :D). But that headline would not have interested anyone and I don't like Arccos would have liked the sound of it either.
 

garyinderry

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apart from statistics which we all know can be used to prove anything.

is there any logical reason why people would not be hitting it as far?
 

Sports_Fanatic

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apart from statistics which we all know can be used to prove anything.

is there any logical reason why people would not be hitting it as far?

Continued drop in fitness/health including poorer mobility for a lot of the population. That's probably about it or slightly more watered courses around the world to make them softer than they may have been kept in the past.
 

clubchamp98

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My course used to play like a links in summer but hasn’t been like that for years.
we have had some very nice weather recently but the water table is so high the course is still very green.

With all the new tech drivers etc I would say most people have picked up a few yds.
But I don’t know or have ever seen anyone using this system or any other.
I have only used trackman and over the years have lost length due to age, but the tech has kept that in check a bit so not much difference to me .

The younger lads and juniors at my club have not lost anything they hit it miles.
 
D

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is there any logical reason why people would not be hitting it as far?

On here, and out and about I read/hear alot of people saying that the rough at their courses is getting very long and/or thick.
That would reduce run out on drives which miss fairways.
 

clubchamp98

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On here, and out and about I read/hear alot of people saying that the rough at their courses is getting very long and/or thick.
That would reduce run out on drives which miss fairways.
surely they would only count fairway shots in this data , the misses would be in the 25% rejected.

Mind you I would take a75% FIR .

The rough at Grange is a bad as I have seen ,It’s an 8iron out max. you need to be on top of the ball to see it but stray to far and you don’t get it back it’s Knee high in places.
 

Capella

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surely they would only count fairway shots in this data , the misses would be in the 25% rejected.

Nope, they aren't (assuming they take the same dataset that they do to calculate the individual average distances for a certain player). Of course, if the misses are in the shortest or longest 12.5%, they are taken out, but it is not a longest drive comp. It does not have to be on the fairway to count.
 

Lord Tyrion

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They are not measuring perfect drive distances, they are measuring the average. That means a mixture of good, bad and somewhere in the middle.

If only the number of drives measured was a decent number in order to iron out minor errors :whistle:. That way the flick of a branch, the gust of wind, the downpour slowing the course would not have so much of an impact. Of course, no one is mentioning the drive that hits a sprinkler head, road, path etc and leaps forward. Nor the concrete fairway, the downward slope etc. Perhaps next time they will compare 20m drives, perhaps that is more representative than just the 10m they looked at this time.
 
D

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They are not measuring perfect drive distances, they are measuring the average. That means a mixture of good, bad and somewhere in the middle.

If only the number of drives measured was a decent number in order to iron out minor errors :whistle:. That way the flick of a branch, the gust of wind, the downpour slowing the course would not have so much of an impact. Of course, no one is mentioning the drive that hits a sprinkler head, road, path etc and leaps forward. Nor the concrete fairway, the downward slope etc. Perhaps next time they will compare 20m drives, perhaps that is more representative than just the 10m they looked at this time.

I think it's been said a few times before that the system takes out the extremes ie, tops, fats, massively downhill, down wind, cart path etc etc etc
 

Lord Tyrion

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I think it's been said a few times before that the system takes out the extremes ie, tops, fats, massively downhill, down wind, cart path etc etc etc

Sorry, I know. My post was written with a heavy sense of sarcasm but there is not an emoji for that :D. People are trying to suggest the figures are not accurate because of the odd, what if? 10m shots. 10m. That is as good a sample as has ever likely been taken for any experiment, ever. Take the best and the worst out and you have 10m out of which to gauge an average. I'm not sure why people are so disbelieving of the figures. Is a better representation what someone of the forum sees in their 4 ball on a Saturday?
 

rksquire

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apart from statistics which we all know can be used to prove anything.

is there any logical reason why people would not be hitting it as far?

My guess here is that the technology has become more accessible. How did we measure amateur distances in the 80s? In the 90s? In the early 2000s? Partly on hearsay and surveys allowing for handicap and a range of distances (like a poll on here), where we are prone to ignore our typical or average and lean more towards our best? Possibly on trackmans during lessons? Again, whilst amateur golfers these were people taking golf seriously and paying not only for lessons but for trackman lessons - not necessarily your average punter, more the more serious amateur.

Now, however, stats for amateurs can be automatically tracked and this can all be filled into one big database. I suspect, whilst the system has faults, we're now getting increasingly more realistic feedback. So, people are hitting it as far they always did, or even further, we're just getting more accurate feedback now than we're used to.
 
D

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Sorry, I know. My post was written with a heavy sense of sarcasm but there is not an emoji for that :D. People are trying to suggest the figures are not accurate because of the odd, what if? 10m shots. 10m. That is as good a sample as has ever likely been taken for any experiment, ever. Take the best and the worst out and you have 10m out of which to gauge an average. I'm not sure why people are so disbelieving of the figures. Is a better representation what someone of the forum sees in their 4 ball on a Saturday?

I think people are just trying to figure out why the distance would be coming down, and trying to think of possible reasons.
If the tech is better, which the magazines and producers tell us it is, what other reasons could there be?
Is it the tech, the players, the system itself is more or less accurate, the courses?

I don;t think people are saying it's wrong, just they are trying to figure out the cause.

Me, I'm just annoyed they used my picture to demonstrate this article (and I'm trying to get some freebies out of it)
 
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