Professionally review and evaluate your practise to monitor your improvements then take them to the golf course
What This Is
Graham Walker created, developed, refined and continuously improved these skills challenges since the 1980’s.
These are the same challenges he gets his clients to do, including a Ryder Cup star who regularly uses them. Two major winners were using these challenges 10 and 20 years ago as they learned to play. Joe Dean was up at The Oaks doing them on 15th February before flying to Kenya, finishing tied 2nd and getting featured on the national news!
These skills can be done on the range or on the golf course (during practise rounds) and they keep track of your actual performance in practise. As at 26th February 2024 with a menu of 110 challenges to choose from, we are delighted to now introduce them to the wider golfing community.
* Actually, 114 challenges by the close of the day and there will be more to come including revisions, fine-tuning and improvements driven by the data that you provide.
Distance Control v Proximity
Hitting it close is one skill. Being consistently in control of your distances is another. For all Approach play and Wedges, Short irons challenges, the golfer has the option to record either proximity OR distance control for each challenge.
If the target is 103 yards, the shot that landed on line 4.5 feet short of the pin counts as 4.5 feet for proximity or 1.5 yards for distance control. If the shot is a slight pull that lands 20 feet away but only 1 yard beyond pin high - or the equivalent of 104 yards from the start position if we ignore Pythagorus for a moment :) - the result is worse if a proximity challenge but better if distance control.
Remember this; Golf is easier on the range. It’s tougher with a card in our hands. You’ll see precisely by how much once you’ve recorded a good-sized data sample. Don’t be fooled by how good your Strokes Gained values might look in most of these challenges. Those benchmarks were taken from tens of millions of data points on the course during professional competition with all the variabilities of lie, wind, humidity, altitude etc. and the pressure that you don’t face in practise. Under (negative) V-Par but positive Strokes Gained are the numbers you want to see.
Who It’s For
For any golfer, at any level, who wants to improve and for any coach, to track how well and how hard their golfers are working.
* In terms of data protection, permission from the golfer will of course be required to grant coach access to see their stats
“Success” in golf is relative. However we define success and whatever our goals are, Golf Scoring Skills is all about how to practise with purpose and helping you improve the basic skills that we need in golf.
With date filters giving unlimited options, the golfer and the coach can track their progress over time.
The collective analysis tables allows coaches to view all their squad members at the same time and to compare their results side-by-side. Date, Player and Challenge filters allow the coach to drill into any part of the game or even to compare two players against each other.
The key provides 20 different rating options - including A+, A and A minus, B+ B etc. - which gives an immediate overview snapshot of what is good, bad and indifferent. The V-Par averages have been calculated based on professional level data IN PRACTISE over many decades, in all parts of the game and for every skill in golf. We anticipate that these will be tweaked in the coming weeks and months as the sheer volume of data collected expands. The Strokes Gained measurements are all much easier than V-Par, as we can expect for specific performance in practise.
The beauty of these challenges is that they do not require to be done with launch monitors every time, which most of our pro clients have already. Amateurs can start and complete any individual challenge (or a number of them simultaneously) on the golf course during a practise round, using a distance measuring device or even a strokesaver. By having the ability to keep open active/ unfinished/ incomplete challenges, the golfer can use a number of challenges for different parts of the game at the same time.
About Us
You may have heard of Echo & the Bunnymen and Martha & the Muffins - or maybe not, you'd have to be as old as some of us to have done - well this is Graham & the Geeks!
Graham Walker (the guy on the left of Ian and Tommy in the photo at the top) is the ringleader, a world class coach who invented these challenges, years ahead of the times. We geeks are the support act; Ian and Will the software engineer gurus who make it all possible, Lewis the "social media mafia" (who educates the elderly team members) and Graeme, the stats analyst who tries to bind the whole thing together.
We thank our partners and our beta testers to get us this far but most of all, we thank you, the golfers who work at your games with so much energy and enthusiasm. Without your continuing data input, we would never have learned what good or average actually is in every part of this crazy beautiful game!
Get Started
We're working behind the scenes to get our new subscription management system up and running.
Having completed a successful period of beta testing – where all the challenges, data captures and computations are working perfectly – we now invite golfers who want to join to get in touch.
Let us know the level of golf you play at e.g. your handicap if amateur and where you are based. We shall respond within a maximum of 12 hours in the vast majority of cases. Email us at info@golfscoringskills.com
