How to use performance data to build confidence and improve your scores, with mental performance coach Chris Kirkland
Statistics have become a huge part of the elite game, but how many of you reading this edition use hard data to assess where your game is and where it needs to go?
It’s easy to judge how you play by just one metric – the final score. However, as data tracking has become more accessible, it’s easier than ever to see where you miss, where you succeed, and what’s trending up or slipping away.
I’m a big fan of the UpGame Golf app, though several others are available. Powerful metrics include miss tendencies (left, right, short or long), proximity to the hole with each club, fairways hit percentage, and putting performance under pressure.
Dispersions tell stories, and knowing how your tee shots and approaches end relative to your intended target matters. Knowing these details, you can make smart decisions on clubs, lines and targets based on what we know is real rather than how we feel. Emotion still plays a role, but backing it up with numbers adds clarity and leads to better decisions.
Tracking your stats also allows you to be clear about your strengths and rely on them to build confidence.
Knowing you’re great from inside 6ft is a powerful tool. It makes lag putting easier, and if you happen to miss one, you’re armed with the knowledge that putt is an outlier not the norm.
You will also learn what you need to prioritise when you work on improving your technique. The stats don’t just show weaknesses, they give clear areas to target when practising.
Instead of making choices driven by fear of mistakes or emotion, you can make them with evidence. If you know your long-iron distances, miss pattern from 170 yards, and putting stats from 6-8ft, your strategy becomes grounded rather than guesswork. The data doesn’t replace feeling, it complements it and when you know your strengths, you can rely on them.
To put this into practice, start by logging what happens on the course – where you missed, how far you were from the hole or target point, how your putts from certain distances performed… An app like UpGame makes this really easy, though you can do it with a notebook or on a scorecard. From there, identify your gap metrics, for example, fairways hit. You can then make decisions on how you practise and make real steps forward that will translate to the course.
It can also be useful to keep a journal of your mental responses at the same time, tracking your responses when you saw the data, how it affected your decisions, what emotions came up, and how you used them.
Ultimately, knowing exactly what you do well, seeing where you’re trending and spotting the gaps allows you to work smart, make informed decisions on the course and when practising, and build confidence to perform from a much stronger foundation.
