ShotLink

2022 Genesis Invitational, No.15 Cameron Young Joaquin Niemann Collin Morikawa

What began as an electronic scoreboard system in 1983 today is one of the most sophisticated scoring and data-collection tools in sports, helping the world of competitive golf to build an incredibly detailed record of its history even as it informs the competitions of the future. You might have seen the computer graphics on your television screen, but you likely haven’t seen what goes on behind the scenes. Beyond the fun computer graphics, ShotLink is changing the tournament game

ShotLink volunteers at the 2022 Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club

As the PGA TOUR describes it, ShotLink is “a revolutionary platform for collecting and disseminating scoring and statistical data on every shot by every player in real-time.” That about sums it up, but it also understates things a bit. Essentially, ShotLink—or PGA TOUR ShotLink System, as the TOUR calls it—captures and reports an incredible amount of data on each shot by each player during PGA TOUR competitions. You likely have seen ShotLink in action during golf tournaments, in the form of computer graphics on your television screen or online via TOURCast, showing an array of arcs and dots indicating ball flight paths and landing areas and detailing whose ball landed where.

Over something like 93 events per year on the PGA, Champions and Korn Ferry tours, ShotLink builds a record that will be important to golf history, but it also helps Tour officials and course managers to form strategies on how best to set up their courses and pins for competitions. Moreover, it tells the truth of what’s happening on course, and that’s provided some illuminating moments, according to Brandon Johnson. Johnson, senior architect and vice president with Arnold Palmer Design Company, was working with the PGA TOUR when ShotLink was evolving into its current form. More than just offering data, he says, it offers truth.

“Being at the TOUR when they were coming up with this, developing what would become ShotLink, was exciting,” he says. “They viewed golf as not having the same kind of statistics as baseball, for example, and thought that if they could track what people are doing, then we can bring to life not only the TV coverage for the fan base, but it could open the door for a bunch of other things, including golf course design and setup, and that’s exactly what it’s done.

“There was a thought or an idea of what was happening at tournaments, but now you have the reality. People might have thought, ‘Everybody is pulling out driver here, this is exactly where everybody hits their tee shot.’ But then it turns out that, ‘Oh! Not everybody is pulling out driver, and there’s a big disbursement of where golf balls go.’ Statistically you really see how the tournaments are played now, they’re tracking so many metrics, and now you can look at course setup based on where a tee is, how wide a fairway is, where a pin is, and you can see a shot pattern developing based on when a pin is placed on the left side versus on the right side, whether distance affects that or not.”

Before an event, golf courses are mapped, yielding a digital image of each hole. This helps ShotLink to calculate exact locations and distances between any two coordinates on that hole, e.g. the tee box and a player’s first shot. A small staff of TOUR employees and roughly 350 volunteers per tournament (nearly 10,000 volunteers per year) run the ShotLink system, scoring each hole with tools that involve a sort of digital camera system.

The end result is a detailed digital image of each shot taken on a course, with variables factored-in as well. Combined with other available data, such as wind, temperature, ground firmness and moisture readings and so on, it provides a record of what happened at any given point.

The data is then used by television broadcast partners and other media to illustrate and to inform golf fans, and it’s used by tournament officials, course managers and architects like Johnson to inform course setups and design.

“For the casual observer, I think many people are thinking, ‘Wow, look at how consistent they are through the field;’ there’s just a blob of where all of the golf balls are going,” Johnson says. “But you start to see the difference when you have a really good pin or a changing condition, wind or something else that forces the player to think, and now all of a sudden that shot pattern is wider. In the best situations, certainly not every tee marker and every location, but you do get those special holes or certain locations where they know it’s going to challenge the player and force him to think, and you do get this variety of shots.”

One thing ShotLink has done in terms of design is to reveal the subtleties of good architecture.

“When you have really good architecture,” Johnson says, “it gives the setup team options and gives the player options, and you’ll see that in the data a little more. I’ve seen it where there’s a par 3 and they’d choose to put a tee in a certain place, and now it’s just a forced carry over water and statistically the hole becomes really boring. Not that many birdies but also not that many bogeys, and everybody kind of shies away from the pin. The casual observer says, ‘Oh, it’s over water, that’s hard!’ But for the pros it’s pretty easy because of the angle. They know they’re going to hit it 190 yards or whatever and they’re more concerned about how far left or right. But bring in the water on a diagonal, move the pin, and now all of a sudden the player has to hedge against going left into a bunker or right into runoff, just because of the angle of where the tee is. That’s the kind of thing that ShotLink can reveal in a detailed way.”

Casual observers might think the pros are all fairly consistent, but ShotLink can show variations in play

Another aspect to ShotLink, Johnson explains, is that it builds this record of statistics that players can use.

“I don’t think it’s every player, but some players really know their statistics, what their strong points are and what their weak points are based on ShotLink data. You start to see this idea of proximity to the hole, over 40 yards in on a par-5 for example, what’s the statistical chance they’re going to make birdie or 175 yards out, what is the statistical difference of their chance to the green from the fairway versus the rough. Some of them will study that and lean into it and use it in competition in terms of decision-making.”

In terms of affecting course architecture, Johnson says that ShotLink isn’t necessarily used in overall designs, but that it can inform certain decisions.

“When you look at a certain hole and someone wants to put a bunker here,” he says, “is it going to be an effective bunker or not, based on what players are doing? If you have the data, you can see if the bunker will affect any change in how the hole is played, you don’t have to guess.”

In the end, though, Johnson returns to the point that ShotLink is all about truth, hard numbers that make solid decision-making possible.

“I can say that there’s been times you’re out in the field and you’re thinking, ‘This pin location is going to be great,’ and then statistically speaking you look at it and that wasn’t the case, or at least it wasn’t the case on that day. There were two cases of that I remember specifically from when we were engaged at TPC Twin Cities. The second hole, there were pins they had up against the water that I think for the average player they would be tough, but for the pro they weren’t. Hole 14 was another one, a front pin. Nobody went long and engaged this bunker and the pins that looked dangerous on the water because of slopes or other things weren’t as challengeing or difficult as they thought they would be. But then there was this back right pin up against the bunker, which didn’t look difficult, but the shot pattern went everywhere. You get all of this information and it’s real; how could you look at that amount of data and discard it?”

ShotLink truck (above left); at the 2021 WGC-Workday Championship at The Concession; and on the 17th hole at THE PLAYERS in 2000