The lockdown gave us all plenty of time to think over the winter season, put our pencil bags away, clean our clubs, shoes and everything else golf-related several times, and think about our priorities for the 2020 season.
One of my priorities for 2020 was improving my approaches to the greens, and in March, just before the start of the season was put on hold, I got the chance to do some detailed work with the Flightscope GCQuad launch monitor at Cocken Lodge with Northern Golfer’s own Doug Brolls.
We spent a couple of hours working through the whole bag, looking at carry distances of all my clubs using new software available on the GCQuad, tweaking lofts where necessary, and putting together a detailed set of numbers for each club.
The Flightscope software does all the hard work and the data is churns out is incredible. It tracks every shot, asks you to select the ones you want (which allows you to get rid of any bad ones) then compiles the data into a print-out, including a section you can cut out and stick in your pocket.
Having that detail to hand is a fantastic resource on the course – provided you’re swinging the club with some consistency and have remembered to take your rangefinder out of the boot of the car, which I didn’t manage my first game after doing all that work.
Getting down to this level of accuracy and going from estimating what you’re doing to knowing it can transform how you look at shots and work out which club to hit. If you have access to a facility like this, it makes the whole process super easy as well – all you need to do is hit the shots. Of course you could also stand on the practice ground at your club and work through your bag, but the ease and accuracy of a system like GCQuad makes the whole process so simple, while working indoors eliminates any inconsistency of wind, lies or how much the ball is running out on the range.
The price of sessions like this, available at facilities across the North East, is also very reasonable.
Now all I need to do is find some of that pre-lockdown consistency again…
