One of the biggest challenges faced by most general managers, owners, and management companies in the golf industry is being able to understand and correctly determine their operational majesty as compared to the work being put in by their competitors.
Knowing how a golf course compares to a competing golf course can help create better benchmarks, which can, in turn, be more segmented and focus only on rounds and revenue (if not the golf club as a whole).
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When developing this golf benchmark for product performance testing/reviews, I felt that tight parameters were necessary. This would help increase the validity and accuracy of not only this benchmark but for future golf testing and reviews as well.
Out of the 13 collected data points, there remain only two that I or any golfer can control. These two data points are the speed of the golf swing and the Power Transfer Index (PTI) or smash factor. I prefer to use PTI as it better describes what is taking place.
The other data points included are Ball Speed, Carry, Role, Total yards, Ball height, Launch angle, Decent angle, Back Spin, Side Spin, Distance offline, and flight time. The one data point I left out was the Spin tilt axis. The reason for omitting this data point is because I felt that the direction of the ball movement is irrelevant due to the tight offline parameter.
For improved consistency and reliability, I chose to allow only 4 miles per hour variance from the lowest to highest swing speed and only a .4 variation in the PTI between the highest and lowest. .4 may not seem like much, but you will quickly see just how much of an impact the little amount can manage to make. This ended up being a lot of work for me because of the fact that I’m just a weekend golfer.
One other restriction I implemented, which makes for better quality control, is how much yardage I allow for the golf ball to be offline. For clubs 3-PW, I only gave myself 15 yards left or right of center 35 yards for the driver and 3 wood I allotted for 35 yards due to the longer distances.
Twenty golf balls were hit with each club to establish an overall average. The golf ball used was a new box of Callaway extra hot golf balls. There was no particular reason for choosing this ball other than the fact that it is the one that I play with regularly. Its older version, the HX HOT, is the one I drove 315 yards with back in the day.
The settings for establishing this baseline were: No wind, 50% humidity, an altitude of 470 ft, which is approximately the altitude where I live, and a standard fairway.
Ever wonder how much more yardage you gain on a dry fairway or at a higher altitude? Or how much you lose on a wet fairway or a windy day? With my SkyTrak Launch Monitor, I can change all those parameters to see how the golf ball performs.
With that said, anything that I have tested, you will be able to compare against not only this benchmark but against other products tested as well.
To my knowledge, there is no other site like this on the web. The reason for this, I believe, because it requires one person and a lot of time. This one person has to not only create the benchmark; he or she also has to hit and swing every ball and club used for testing.
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