APP IS UP ON TEE
Program links smartphones to golf course
You address your ball, 150 yards to the pin. Lie is good, wind helping, seven iron in one hand, smartphone in the other.
That’s what Sal Syed, a cofounder of Arccos Golf, envisions for future of golf.
Syed, 33, had developed the first realtime shottracker that gives everyday golfers the same pool of statistics available to professionals such as Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy, who are competing in the US Open at the Pinehurst No. 2 course this week in North Carolina.
While golfers spend about $4 billion annually in North America on the newest clubs and balls in the quest for improvement, Syed and friend Ammad Faisal say the sport is underserved when it comes to quantitative data analysis. Arccos, which has research and development support from Callaway Golf, wants that to change as it releases its system this summer.
“The idea is to quantify all of golf,” Syed said. “Golfers are nuts about data. We wanted to create something golfers were going to use to understand their game and get the best out of it.”
Syed convinced Faisal, a childhood friend, to leave a banking job on Wall Street to join him in starting Arccos, whose financial backers include Jimmy Dunne, the senior managing principal at Sandler O’Neill & Partners. Dunne won club championships at both Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and Sebonack Golf Club on Long Island, and is the president of Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Fla.
Arccos features small sensors twisted into the end of golf club handles that deliver data directly to a user’s smartphone after a onetime pairing process.
By incorporating the global positioning system function, golfers can instantly see how far they’re hitting the ball, get breakdowns on average distances per club, track their putts and the numbers of greens and fairways hit, and see the direction of most of their misses, possibly allowing them to change tactics during play.
During a round of golf last week at Yale University — where Syed got his MBA because the school has the highestrated golf course of any US college — Syed opted to predominantly use his 3wood over the second nine holes after getting inround feedback that it had been more accurate than his driver and was delivering almost the same distance off the tee.
“This is the tip of the iceberg in data gathering,” said Syed, adding that Arccos eventually will track temperature and elevation changes to show how they may affect shotmaking. “Someone once told me, ‘You can’t improve what you can’t measure.’”
Syed said that instant feedback is exactly what makes Arccos unique in the shottracking industry. Arccos, available for preorders at $299 with an August shipping date, also has to deal with the stigma attached by some golf traditionalists to using mobile phones on the course.