Patrick Brennan
6 minutes
I’ve been stationed as a caddie on the East Coast of Canada for the summer season, and I’ve found it very useful to incorporate TheGrint into my role – which I’ve realized has become much more than a bag carrier. A more appropriate job title would be a mixture of therapist, photographer, motivational speaker and green reader.
In this article, I’ll cover how a caddie can use TheGrint to guide their golfers around the complicated golf courses and how TheGrint has made my life as a caddie much easier.
It is important to know each aspect of a golf course when you are advising others. When describing a tee shot, the golfer often must know where the target is, where to miss, how far their next shot will be, and a lot more.
Sometimes, we need some help with these responsibilities, and this is where TheGrint steps up to the plate.
I regularly use the GPS tool available on TheGrint mobile app, which may surprise some readers. The yardage books available to golfers are usually well-mapped out, as they show distances to bunkers and carry numbers to avoid traps.
However, small changes in tee boxes are hard to account for, whereas the GPS feature in TheGrint can provide accurate yardages to the green. I also frequently use TheGrint GPS system if my golfer is out of position. This does two things:
The top two greatest fears of a caddie are:
1) When the laser battery dies and the spare is in your other jacket and
2) When the laser refuses to cooperate, the mist clouds over; the playing yardage becomes a guessing game.
No matter! In poor visibility, TheGrint can take over. Sometimes all we need is the yardage to the green’s center, and the app can do all this and more using the GPS feature, independent of weather conditions. Combined with some reasonable caddie course knowledge, the player is good to go.
Caddies can also use TheGrint app to keep the scores for our group. Particularly in a Vegas style format, one benefit of the Premium membership is my ability to enter the player’s scores into the app. It can get confusing with split games and multiple games across nine and eighteen holes, but the Grint is able to juggle this responsibility, running several games at a time.
Rather than using a pencil and scorecard while carrying two golf bags, I can put the information into my phone using the Grint mobile app and tally the scores up as we go. I just about have enough pockets for everything, but the two hands are usually full when caddying for two golfers!
The Green Maps feature is more of a personal test for me when playing alone or with other caddies – can our reads match up with the app? Turns out, yes.
But we’re all good caddies! I’ll usually rely on my caddie knowledge and training for the green reads, especially because there are a multitude of ways to communicate the pace, slope and grain of a putt. I personally dislike the use of percentages,(i.e. slightly downhill is 80 or 90%, who knows) but some players appreciate a more numbers-oriented method of caddying.
It has genuinely been very useful for me to have the app ready during a caddie loop. Sometimes, guys will just want to know their score, and you can accurately explain to them where the shots were gained and lost, where the bad holes came and why. Some guys want to compare handicap indexes – or even bucket list golf courses! It’s an app for golf junkies, and you meet plenty of those when caddying full-time.
