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How Much Does Wind Impact Scoring?

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Let’s Look at Some Wind Data

One of the things I spend a lot of time with elite players on is playing shots in different wind conditions. Because we play golf outdoors across many different weather conditions, understanding how the wind will impact ball flight is just as important as reading greens.

Today, we are going to dip our toe into some wind data.

The data below probably won’t surprise you, but this will probably be the first time you’ve seen it quantified with how wind impacts scoring.

One of the things that Arccos (DATALOU15 saves 15%) is capturing behind the scenes is weather information on every shot. I used that info to crunch the numbers on how playing into the wind “hurts” you from a scoring perspective.

The charts below show how many more shots a player will average from a given distance to the hole, broken down by three different wind speeds (5-9mph, 10-14mph, 15-19mph). The “baseline” it is being compared to is when the wind is calm (4mph or less).

At each distance there is an average number of shots players will need to hole out in calm conditions and that is compared to the average number of shots that they will need to hole out when they are playing into the wind.

The charts below basically show how many shots harder it is to play into the wind compared to when it is calm.

You will notice that players are impacted less from closer to the hole in a stroing wind, then the max impact of wind happens around 140 yards or so, and then as you get farther from the hole that impact starts to drop off a bit.

From 140 yards all the way out to 180, playing into a strong wind, a scratch player will average around 0.15 more strokes than they would in calm conditions.

In the coming weeks, I’ll have some other deep dives on helping wind as well as cross winds. Some very interesting things to come, especially the downwind data!

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