Driving Accuracy by Handicap – What’s Your Target?

Sending bombs straight down the fairway is probably one of the most coveted abilities in golf. There’s just something about being able to hit a ball further than the rest of your foursome that gives you a special feeling, even if it doesn’t translate to the rest of your game. However, what happens when you miss the fairway?

Well, today we’ll dig into millions of rounds to analyze the Driving Accuracy by Handicap and the correlation to # of penalties per round to help you see where you stand in terms of hitting fairways out of the tee. This will also help you set realistic targets of what % of fairways you should be hitting by allowing you to compare yourself against players with slightly better handicaps.

Let’s dig in!

Blue bars represent the fairway accuracy and the green line represents the average number of penalties per round.

As we can see, scratch golfers hit fairways 63% of the time, which means they hit 9 fairways out of the 14 driveable holes while high handicappers, hit about 7 of those. However, the real difference in driving comes from the fact that when high handicappers miss, their misses have higher dispersion, therefore incurring in more penalties (almost 6 per round vs 1 for scratch golfers)

If you’d like to keep track of this and many other stats that will help you improve your game, you should become a   PRO Member. You’ll notice patterns, strengths, and weaknesses that will help you identify gaps in your game to address the next time you hit the range.

Enjoy your golf!