THE SHORT STORY
Simple Golf Insights
Wasted Shots helps make you a better golfer by helping you realize where you waste shots in a round. Rather than tracking traditional stats, we get you to focus on these key stats:
Makeable Putts: "Makeable" means something different to every golfer. For some it's 2 feet, for some it's 9 feet, for some it varies by hole. Basically, if you leave a hole and think "I should have made that one", it was makeable.
Scrambling: We include pitches, chips, and lag putts.
Approach Shots: This is the range of shots that get you into your scrambling range.
Long Distance: This is the range of shots that get you into your approach shot range. These are your drives on par 4s and par 5s, and your second shots on par 5s.
If you're successful in those key stats on every hole, you're a par shooter. If you're hoping to shoot 90, you can waste one of those shots per hole.
As you play, we'll tell you how you're tracking each of those stats. After you play, you'll know what to practice.
Get started and we'll ask you for your goal. Then we'll start to break it down for you.
THE LONG STORY
The Industry-Leading App
Wasted Shots is a golf tracking app built by world class software developers who are below-average golfers. As software developers, we love solving problems, so we set out to solve the problems with our golf games and came up with this app.
We started out tracking our rounds using the traditional methods - fairways hit, greens in regulation, putts, penalties, etc. But that wasn't helping us get better. So we started over, breaking down each hole from the cup back to the tee.
We tracked our short putts per hole. That's all. We started out thinking if we could just make sure we never had more than one putt missed (inside a 3-foot circle), we'd score better. And it worked! So we took a step further back from there.
We realized that we weren't always putting from within that short putt circle on every hole. You've seen it before. You have a 30 foot putt that you knock past 15 feet, then knock that one 6 feet past and make it. 3 putts, none inside the short putt range. What a waste. So we updated our app to track scramble shots outside our short putt range. We focused on that more when playing and practicing (chipping and lag putting in a tiny office is fun), and saw positive results.
So we tried to figure out how to take another step back from the green toward the tee. Should we track greens in regulation? Seems like a tough stat for full time software developers to master. Fairways hit? Sure that would be nice to track, but we don't have time to waste on the range. So we decided it would be best to track how often our approach got us into our scrambling range. The thought was that we could try to hit the green, lag putt to our short putt range, then make the putt for par. The alternative was a slight miss, a chip, a lag putt, and a short putt for bogey. We found ourselves worrying less about greens in regulation and trying hero shots, and just settling for getting the ball within 40 yards on a safe side of the pin. Even the worst golfing software developer can hit a green that is an 40-yards wide in every direction!
When we did that, the monster holes started to disappear and our scores started to plummet. We ended up noticing that there were a lot of shots in the "approach" range, so we added the long distance range so we could determine whether we were wasting shots on the tee or on our approach.
We found that we were wasting most of our shots (and our money) on the practice range. We became better golfers by always working on our short and lag putting. There's definitely room to hit the range, but we found that we improved even though we wasted one less bucket on the range per week!