Corey Conners has a card in his yard book that helps him calculate the carry distances at Castle Pines using his stock yards.
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The PGA Tour returns to Castle Pines, home of the BMW Championship, for the first time since 2006 following a ten-year run to host The International. With so many experts in the field this week, it’s one of the few times they’ll have to get out the calculator and crunch the numbers before making a switch.
At nearly 6,200 feet above sea level, every golfer on the course will be blessed with more distance across the board, thanks to the lower air density. The pros don’t sweat the challenge of facing the longest course in PGA Tour history (8,130 yards) because Castle Pines will play 7,350 yards at sea level, which doesn’t seem difficult.
When it comes to counting yards? That’s a different story. Standard percentages give a rough idea of how far the ball will travel at altitude, but those formulas often fall short of the precise standards required by professionals. Guessing is not an option in the thin mountain air.
Ping
To help Ping staff calculate their yardage, the touring team distributes personalized, laminated cards that take into account everything from wind speed and direction to course and temperature to produce an accurate “playable” number for every shot.
According to Marty Jertson, Ping’s VP of fitness and performance, the cards have been used in the past by former Ping employee Jim Knous – who joined the equipment manufacturer as a fitness and education engineer earlier this year – and the technicians who use it in the program. Colorado Korn Ferry Tour event. But this week marks the first time he’s handed out a cheat sheet to all of Ping’s crew on the field at Castle Pines.
“Sheets are not unique to each player, and they help them in two ways,” Jertson told GOLF.com. “The first, by adjusting their height. We change the temperature, too. So if you start at 75 degrees and finish at 90, the ball goes 4 yards if you finish at that temperature. It is more accurate than what players often use, which is to set their rangefinder in meters or use a fixed percentage across the range.
“At altitude, because the air density is lower, the wind affects your shot – and this depends on the player and the golf ball – about half as much as at sea level. So if you have a damaging 10 mph wind at sea level, if you hit a high, soft fairway you could hurt your 7-iron about 25 yards. At Castle Pines, it can hurt that shot in the same wind from 15 yards. It will help the players in a number of different ways.”
To build each sheet, Ping had a professional hit a stock driver to capture ball speed, launch and spin, then hit a stock 7-iron. The golf ball they were currently using was also included in the formula. Since then, the Gapping App on Ping Co-Pilot has helped create player-specific carry yards at the Castle Pines high ground based on their personal numbers.
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“This gives the golfer a fair number of putts for a lot of different distances,” says Jertson. “They are very independent from the player. For example, Corey Conners has very low spin with his driver but high spin in our irons. Those are things we can count.”
While it’s not clear who will be on the cards when the tournament begins, Jertson and Ping Tour representative Kenton Oates confirmed that Conners is the one to use after checking the numbers in recent practice rounds.
“Corey told me the sheet was there and ready,” Jertson said. ” He used it in practice rounds and really liked it. And the player doesn’t even need to carry it; caddy can and will make things clearer. I actually used it on the playing side and on the caddy side. It’s the equivalent of Aim Point, but spiritual.”
Of all the features a card has, Jertson is quick to highlight the wind chart below that includes “help” (downwind) and “harm” (air). The first iteration Jertson created was able to numerically simulate all the different wind conditions, yardage and position day and night. But it is difficult to move a large binder through MyRIAD with a number of numbers and make a quick calculation in the course.
Once Jertson was able to condense the wind path numbers into a simplified version, he added remote areas and the ability to account for diverging winds and different routes to get the full picture.
For now, laminated cards remain the travel option, but Jerston indicated that could change in the future.
“We’re fixing it,” Jertson said. “We want to be able to convey this to the people. What I enjoyed was getting down to that one number playing in my head. I put in wind, temperature and elevation – and I have 178 yards on the hole. I want to know if it plays like 197 after putting everything together. This is number one in my head. It just helps you as a golfer, especially as a tournament golfer.”
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