Imagine it is a glorious Sunday morning in your favorite fairway. There is nothing but green ahead of you and the wind is blowing in your favor. You are ready to hit the ball. You look down, put the ball on the tee and wonder what your best approach for this shot is.
This is one of the biggest problems for any avid golf player. For many it may sound simple, but for others it is not. If you ask any of your golf friends, certainly they will tell you their own insights, or like a golf teacher told me: “have the clubface, stance and shoulders ´square´ and you are set.” Honestly, I didn’t get it because, as I see it, I have no defined process for aiming and no way to see if I am doing it properly.
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This is why we need state-of-the art tools to improve our game, explained Daniel Weitzner, senior vice president of Visual Sports, a Canadian company specializing in simulators for sports like hockey, baseball, soccer, and now golf.
The company based in Toronto and founded in 1999, developed the SwingTrack Club, a high-speed, HD swing analysis system that provides instant video and data feedback giving golfers an easy-to-understand picture, especially on how swing mechanics, clubface-ball impact and ball flight affect their overall performance. This simulator is built on years of research and development from the Visual Sports product innovation labs.
“Golfers really embrace technology and they would take anything that really helps them improve their game,” said Weitzner. “We are pushing it to the next level.”
The system is mounted in front of you to capture the full motion of your swing and features an ultra-HD, high-speed color camera that produces an array of data. Users can view their swing, which can record the ball flight at a rate of 2,000 frames per second, make notes with the software’s integrated drawing tools and analyze it frame by frame to detect even the smallest flaws; and a session can be saved, downloaded and reviewed to track progress over time.
In the last 25 years the entire face of sports changed drastically with the advent of new technologies. The level of scientific research into something as simple as hitting a ball can be mind-boggling, and golf is a sport that is rapidly being evolved by technology.
“Everything should be interactive,” said Weitzman who believes static stuff does not motivate people. “You’re looking for people to get engaged, have fun, and want to come back to play next week.”
But getting back to play is a problem now for the golf world. For example, the sport has been practiced in the U.S. since the late 19th century, and according to the PGA there are nearly 15,000 courses in the country, and approximately more than 29 million Americans played at least one round of 18 holes last year. But many Americans are continuing to recover financially in the wake of the recent recession. So golf has become a hobby that’s too expensive for some people to maintain. About 400,000 people hung up their golf shoes for good in the last two years.
“The game is too slow, it’s too expensive, and it’s too difficult,” said Jack Nicklaus last year before a tournament in the U.K. Also, the world’s number 1 ranked player, Rory McIlroy, said in a BBC interview that “people don’t have five or six hours a day to go and play golf.”
This is where SwingTrack Club may be able to give the sport a boost at the right time, by giving everyone from hard-core golf enthusiasts to beginners an easy, fast way to play some of the best courses in the world.