T U M W P e ISOPAR Method Michael Stöckl, Peter Lamb & Martin Lames Faculty of Sports and Health Sciences Connollystrasse 32 80809 Munich Germany
[email protected] [email protected] June 27, 2011 Abstract e ISOPAR method is a method for characterizing the difficulty of golf holes and allows the per- formance of shots to be analyzed. e method is based on the ball locations provided by ShotLink™and the subsequent number of shots required to hole out from each respective location. ISOPAR values are calculated which represent the number of shots the field would require to hole out. ese ISOPAR values can, a) be visualized on an ISOPAR map and, b) lead to a new performance indicator called Shot ality, which is the difference between the ISOPAR values of the starting position and finishing position, respectively. e Shot ality score can also be used to determine how many shots were saved per shot, or per type of shot, with respect to the performance of the field. 1 Introduction In performance analysis, characteristics of a process which describe how an outcome was achieved are used to assess the performance itself (Hughes & Bartle, 2002) and are referred to as performance indica- tors. Classical performance analysis techniques in golf have focused on classes of golf shots (James, 2007), such as driving distance, approach shot accuracy and puing average (James & Rees, 2008). Measures like greens in regulation, average pus per green and driving distance are intended to describe players’ abilities to perform certain types of shots, yet these abilities are not actually assessed.