Round zero: why I'm tracking every shot, not just my score

I've been playing golf for a few years and shooting somewhere in the low-to-mid 90s for most of two seasons. Every round ends the same way: a good number of pars, a couple of blow-up holes, and a scorecard that tells me what I shot but nothing about why. I couldn't tell you, with any confidence, whether my last bad round was a putting problem, a wedge problem, or just two bad tee shots that turned into doubles.

So I'm starting a log. Nothing fancy, six numbers per round, tracked the same way every time, kept somewhere I'll actually look at again. That's the whole idea behind this site: use the numbers I already have access to as an amateur, without gadgets, to figure out where a round of golf actually goes wrong.

What I'm logging

Six things, all countable during a normal round with nothing more than a pencil:

Fairways hit, out of the holes where a fairway exists to hit (usually 14 of 18).
Greens in regulation, out of 18.
Total putts for the round.
Up-and-down attempts and makes: any time I miss a green, did I get it up and down for par or better?
Penalty strokes: anything out of bounds, in the water, or unplayable.
The score itself, for context.

None of this needs a launch monitor or a shot-tracking sensor. It's the same handful of stats that amateur golf instruction has pointed to for years, just rarely tracked consistently by the golfers those numbers are actually about.

A scorecard tells you what happened. It doesn't tell you which three swings cost you the round.

What I'm building alongside it

Because I also write code, the plan is to turn this log into something useful instead of a spreadsheet nobody opens twice. First up is Round X-Ray, a small calculator that takes those six numbers and estimates which part of the game (tee shots, approach play, short game, or putting) is costing the most strokes relative to a typical bogey-golfer benchmark. I wrote up exactly how it works, and where the benchmark numbers come from, in a separate post, because I don't want to hand anyone a number without showing the arithmetic behind it.

After that: a round tracker and a practice-block sheet you can print and take to the range, both in printables, and eventually a paid kit and a 12-week plan once there's enough of a track record here to justify charging for it.

Why do this in public

Partly because writing the numbers down in a place other people can see is a better way to stay honest about my own game than a private note on my phone. Partly because if you're also stuck in the 90s, there's a decent chance the same six stats will be more useful to you than another swing tip. Either way, the next post is already half-written: what actually separates a bogey golfer from a scratch player, and it isn't what most range sessions are built around.