Article by Guy Cipriano, Golf Course Industry

Unknowingly, many golf maintenance pros are already using data to support decisions.

“What we have to realize is what data is: It’s written-down observations,” says Dr. Bill Kreuser, the president and co-founder of GreenKeeper, a service offering science-based information, products and recommendations to turfgrass managers. “Superintendents are some of the most observant people and they keep track of what they are seeing. Turning it into data is the next step of writing it down or logging it somewhere so that you don’t live in the moment, and you can look for long-term trends.”

Bodo Sieber, the CEO of Tagmarshal, a system designed to help golf facilities navigate on-course traffic, compares a golf course to the human body. Data ensures operations are conducted at peak efficiency.

“If you go for a health check and you know what your critical body KPIs are, you can make better decisions, and adjust your lifestyle,” Sieber says. “If you’re trying to run a marathon, trying to get fit, and if you don’t engage the science behind what your body needs, then you’re going to try, but you’re going to fail. It’s the same with a golf operation.”

Sieber adds that data comes in two forms: what’s happening in real-time and what has happened over time. Soil and air temperatures, golf cart and maintenance vehicle movement, and soil moisture levels are examples of real-time data being accumulated on golf courses. Clipping yields, Growing Degree Days, and spray and fertility records are examples of historic data.

Data and analytics have become so prevalent in professional sports that nearly every major franchise devotes full-time personnel to interpreting them.

Could a need for similar personnel and departments reach golf facilities? Full-time data analysts are unlikely — and unnecessary — in golf course management, according to Tagmarshal CEO Bodo Sieber. “That would be complete overkill,” he says.

Instead of hiring a data analyst, Sieber recommends facilities identifying and developing a “champion” for prodding their property in a data-driven direction. Once that person is selected, they should receive opportunities to research how various platforms can help the course achieve its goals.

“You don’t need to be a data scientist,” Sieber says. “You need to play people to their strengths. If somebody is a little bit more technical and likes digging into data and systems, then make them the champion and empower them. Make it their mission. They can add a lot of value by teaching, training others, and answering their questions.”

GreenKeeper president and co-founder Dr. Bill Kreuser also doesn’t view a data manager position as a necessity for a golf facility because automation offered by emerging platforms will simplify numerical-based decisions.

“The old-school method might have been you hire a data analyst, and they dig and pull up databases and try to make connections,” Kreuser says. “With how fast things are moving on the tech side, we will be able to get a lot of value through automation. These services are cheaper. Computer scientists make them, and we can apply them to all sorts of industries and sectors. We’re just brining it to the golf sector.”

In addition to conducting research and working with turf managers, Kreuser assists in the maintenance and management of Jim Ager Memorial Golf Course, a 9-hole, par-3 layout and learning center in Lincoln, Nebraska. Measuring clippings and tracking growth rates supports fertility decisions on Ager’s greens, while data provided via a sensor resulted in a steep fertility reduction on fairways, according to Kreuser.

“Having that consistent product is important and we have overall doubled the amount of rounds at the par-3 at Lincoln Ager, because people know when they go there they can expect consistent, firm, fast putting greens and they can work on their short game,” Kreuser says. “Having consistency in the end product is important for the course.”

Using data collected via a traffic management platform can lead to a direct ROI. Studying historic and live traffic patterns can help operators adjust tee time and better position maintenance employees around play. Data on how long it takes golfers to play holes can be incorporated into course setup decisions to boost pace of play.

“Even if we can shave two minutes off these two holes, three minutes off that hole, one minute on this hole and two minutes at the halfway house, we have shaved off 10 minutes,” Sieber says. “That means one additional tee time that we never had. One more tee time means four times $80 the club never had.”

Sieber’s company recently worked with a course in Colorado to determine why one hole took nearly five minutes longer to complete than its projected time. The data they collected determined a medium-sized bush impeded play. The bush was removed. “It was a very low-cost exercise, and they never would have known that, because there are a lot of those bushes on the course,” Sieber says. “None were an issue besides this one.”

Sieber adds that effective data integration using automated programs will clear time for the most important and often most enjoyable part of a golf job: cultivating relationships.

“Very often at a golf facility the staff needs to make things work while their hair is on fire, because they are short-staffed and there’s always more to do,” Sieber says. “The less time I have to run around and try to make things work at my golf course, collect data points and use reams of paper to write down things so that I can stay ahead of things, the more time I have to build relationships and add to the experiences of the players I’m serving.”

Sieber admits that golf lags behind many other industries in collecting data besides basic financial information. He sees positives in the slow start.

“The good news is that it’s obviously easier to jump onto something that another industry has pioneered,” Sieber says. “They have done the hard part. If it took another industry 10 or 15 years to get to a certain point, you can hopefully get there in eight years or shorter.”

Dozens of effective apps and platforms have entered the golf maintenance market over the past decade. And dozens more are coming.

“The adoption curve will accelerate over the next three years and technology will continue to get better and improve,” Dorer says. “There was a day when the handheld soil monitoring devices weren’t on a golf course. Now pretty much everybody has one.

“What’s the next step? What do you do with that data? Right now, it’s helping maybe in daily operations, but I think where it’s going to help is in more planning and providing higher levels of predictability.”

Predicting exactly where, when and how superintendents will incorporate and utilize data might be as tricky as winning a March Madness office pool. Superintendents are a fundamentally imaginative group.

“The creativity and inventiveness in how to apply some of these tools by superintendents is really amazing and we’re actually counting on that,” Dorer says. “We know that we can’t think of all the different ways they can use data.”

The 2024 PGA Show in Orlando, Florida was an action-packed, energetic affair, and Tagmarshal was excited to join –  bringing technology solutions, data-driven insights and innovation to the thriving golf industry!

Booth #3123 was buzzing throughout the 3-day show and it was a great pleasure to meet so many golf managers, directors of golf, their teams and our partners in person at the biggest golf event on the calendar.

The golf industry is set for a bumper 2024, following a year of record traffic with 531 million rounds played across the US.

Courses are increasingly finding themselves under pressure, trying to deliver consistent player experiences, both in terms of pace of play and course flow, amid a high volume of rounds.

By embracing technology and automation, and using this to collect data that helps them better understand every facet of how a course runs, operators can make informed decisions that lead to optimal performance.

In addition, with the rise of AI, operators are finding that the more data they gather, the greater the opportunity for machine learning to benefit, thereby strengthening the insight the system delivers.

Used correctly, the data generated by optimization systems like Tagmarshal will be your course’s superpower. Let’s unpack how effectively gathering and using this data will transform your operation.

DATA HELPS YOU ENHANCE THE PLAYER EXPERIENCE

Pace and flow of play consistently rank among the top factors impacting a player’s enjoyment of their round. Through the use of advanced AI and machine learning, based on data from more than 50 million rounds, Tagmarshal’s powerful algorithms identify potential problem groups before issues arise.

With proactive pace management, you can avoid on-course bottlenecks and ensure a steady course flow.

A study by the USGA also found that golfer interactions with player assistants (previously referred to as marshals) can make or break how a player recalls their round. Use the data gathered and generated by Tagmarshal to transform your conversations with players, ensuring they are neutral and fact-based while adding value to the experience.

With built-out, data-rich player profiles, showing their full pace history, you can assign appropriate tee times, as well as offer on-course service tailored to their particular preferences.

PRO TIP: You can reframe post-round conversations with players by using Tagmarshal’s Track Map, which includes all logged interactions, geofence breaches and their pace against your goal time.

DATA UNLOCKS INSIGHTS AND AIDS OPTIMAL DECISION-MAKING

Raw data is a starting point for improvement, but to do so you need to find a way to spot trends. With Tagmarshal’s Analytics Hub, all of the data gathered by the system’s extensive feature set is brought together and presented in an insightful, visually appealing, simplified manner.

Following a powerful system upgrade, which shows each member of your team menu options that are relevant to their role so they can analyze what is important to them, the Analytics Hub is fine-tuned to show you unique data insights that highlight areas for improvement.

These include:

• Playing Group Performance bar charts – help identify periods that play quicker and track on-course interactions and interventions.
• Starter accuracy data – reveals how much of an impact a late tee-off has on each round, as well as the rounds that follow.
• Hole stats data – makes it easy to spot opportunities to optimize your hole setups and shows how long players are waiting on each tee box.
• Pace Distribution charts – provide a true and comprehensive look at how completed rounds compare to the goal time you have set and what proportion of your players are on pace.

Aiding better decision-making for optimal course management, these powerful data insights give you the tools you need to ensure you are prioritizing the player experience, as well as holding your team accountable for continuous improvement.

PRO TIP: Tagmarshal integrates with more than 25 of the world’s leading golf technology systems, bringing exponential value to your course by combining data insights from multiple sources to help you unlock new opportunities.

DATA DRIVES CONTINUOUS, INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENT

To achieve continuous, incremental improvement, you need to set short and long-term goals. This is only possible if you have benchmark data that helps you understand what is realistically possible across a season, or from one year to the next, at your course.

Using Tagmarshal’s Goal Setting feature, you can set your team goals, which are reflected in the Analytics Hub. These can be set across key metrics:

• Rounds on Pace: How many rounds finish within your course’s goal time on a given day.
• Interactions Per Day: This can be a friendly check-in or an intervention with players on the course.
• Intervention Success: An intervention is considered a success then it results in a group getting back on pace and finishing the round within the goal time.
• Assignment: The number of tags that have group or caddie names assigned to them.

PRO TIP: A 1% improvement every day across an entire season quickly adds up, leading to a transformational effect on how your course operates.

DATA HELPS PROTECT YOUR TURF

These days, it’s not enough to rely on signage alone to protect sensitive areas of your course.

Tagmarshal’s geofencing technology allows you to create geofence templates, which can be toggled between depending on weather conditions and other variables.

To help with accountability, all geofence breaches are logged in Tagmarshal’s system and are accessible during or after a round. In the case of the latter, make use of the Track Map feature to show players the exact time and location that they transgressed.

As you build out the tracking data, you can identify areas where regular breaches occur and increase protective measures such as additional signage.

Tagmarshal’s Heatmap Visualization feature (seen above) will identify areas that are receiving high traffic. This works by entering a course utilization time frame, which then depicts all collected geolocation data by carts and walkers that the system has tracked. Visible wear patterns reveal areas with the most traffic, which are the most at risk of soil compaction.

PRO TIP: Using data, your maintenance team can be more targeted in their approach to upkeep, reducing expenses in areas like fertilizer and water use for a more eco-friendly, sustainable approach.

DATA HELPS GENERATE ADDITIONAL REVENUE

Through proactive pace management strategies enabled by Tagmarshal, you’ll find your pace of play and course flow steadily improving. The next step is using the data to identify opportunities to add additional tee times, in a way that doesn’t impact the player experience.

Daily fee and resort courses benefit from immediate and significant revenue gains, while private clubs can offer their members greater opportunities to play during peak periods.

With improved pace and course flow, players are generally willing to pay more for a round and are more likely to return to play your course again.

PRO TIP: Dynamic pricing, where the price of a round shifts in response to real-time supply and demand, works best when your course can guarantee players an enjoyable pace and flow of play.

CONCLUSION

Without data, your course is essentially flying blind when trying to solve its challenges, and you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

As technology such as AI and machine learning have developed and become integral to modern-day business operations, efficiencies in collecting and processing data have made huge strides.

By ensuring that you are best utilizing the course data you gather, you’ll identify areas where gains can be made, driving incremental improvements and the optimization of your on-course operations.