UpGame - Improving Performance with Statistics

My guest on today’s episode is Ewen from Upgame, one of the leading statistics apps in golf. 

0:00 – 5:00

Introduction to the episode, why stats apps matter, and overview of Upgame’s key differentiator — satellite image–based data entry that makes input easier and more reliable.

5:00 – 10:00

Explaining Pro vs. Basic versions of Upgame, including features like target entry and dispersions, and addressing the challenge of making stats simple enough for club golfers.

10:00 – 15:00

How coaches and academies integrate Upgame differently — from elite players to juniors — with examples of dashboards, coach connectivity, and insights for lesson planning.

15:00 – 20:00

Highlighting overlooked statistics like shot frequency by yardage, and the importance of smarter game planning through target dispersions and course overlays.

20:00 – 25:00

Example of Sawgrass 17th used to illustrate dispersion patterns; discussion of strategy and the value of tournament-based dispersion data under pressure.

25:00 – 30:00

Detailing the TrackMan partnership, including automatic stat integration for simulator rounds and shot analysis data syncing to Upgame for planning and preparation.

30:00 – 35:00

Discussion of new features, especially mental process tracking, where players tag mindset quality alongside shots to measure performance correlations.

35:00 – 40:00

Introduction of AI insights that auto-summarize rounds, expansion of benchmarking options (PGA/LPGA, Division I, WAGR, juniors), and importance of reliable data.

40:00 – 45:00

Advice for club golfers: why using stats matters, why Upgame is the most practical choice, overview of subscription options (including 6-month seasonal), and closing thanks with website/social links.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm the type of person, if you ask me a question and I don't know the answer, I'm going to tell you that I don't know. But I bet you what, I know how to find the answer, and I will find the answer.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

All right, it is, of course, Irish for a very warm welcome, my friends, the Shamiks and Shanks, and another episode we get to learn from some of the best professionals in the golf world. Now, my guest on today's episode is Ewan from Upgame, one of the leading statistics apps in golf. If you're not familiar with UpGame, it's a really powerful tool designed to give golfers a clear picture of how they actually play and perform on the golf course. The mission of this podcast has always been to help you, the club golfer, improve. And not all of us really have the hours and hours it might take to hit balls on the range and search for that technical perfect golf swing. So I think understanding your current tendencies, so with the swing you have, by measuring your performance accurately, is perhaps an easier way to improve and may actually, in the long run, take less time. In our conversation, Ewan explains how UpGame works and the many ways it helps improve performance from highlighting areas that you maybe thought you're performing well and that actually need that time and focus on the range or detailing performance in any category like length of put performance so perhaps I'm better from 5 to 10 feet than I am from 15 to 20 to planning out future round strategies based on previous round shot patterns. Now I've been using Upgame myself in my own game and dealing with my players for quite some time and it's by far the best stats app that I've come across and believe me I've tried a few so with all that said let's dive in here's Ewan from Upgame. Ewan a very warm welcome to Shamrock's and shanks thank you so much for coming on the podcast you work for one of the leading statistics apps out there called up game so you kindly taking a couple of minutes out of your schedule today to talk to us about the app what it's great for how we use it and all the information around it so thank you very much for coming on the show

SPEAKER_03 1:45

Yeah, thanks, Steve. Thanks so much for having me on here. Really excited to be part of the show. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Now, I've used UpGame for quite some time now for my students and even a little bit for my own game, I've got to admit. And it's helped me tremendously. So we wanted to get you on the show basically to explain to customers a little bit of the background of the app, what's it about, what it does, and the benefits of them using it long term. Because one of those challenges with using statistic apps is the input of information. So we want to make sure that customers know, hey, that time you're spending to input, you're getting so much more more back out of it so it's well worth your investment so for listeners maybe you aren't familiar what is up game and who's it for

SPEAKER_03 2:22

so up game is essentially just a golf statistics app you know like like there's so many out there nowadays and i would say our big big separator is from the data entry side because everything is done using satellite images so players don't necessarily have to remember every single yardage they have when they're going through a round because that seems to always be kind of a common thing that comes up is well i've played my round i'm not going to remember every single shot i've hit now you don't need to do that you can just pull up the image of the course and just place your shot on where you remember that you hit it to. Now, that's one big thing of how we operate. And then over time, from when it was first created, I'd say about six and a half years ago, we kind of realized there was an additional kind of need for information, basically measuring a player's intent. And that starts with the target.

UNKNOWN 3:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 3:17

And so our pro version of the app actually has the option to place your target when you're entering your data. So you can really get target-based dispersions. You're also asked to quantify the end shot result beyond just the lie. And I can go into a little more detail, you know, as we talk about this, of what that means. That's a big thing that UpGame is about, is trying to quantify things that haven't actually been really regarded with some of the more, I guess, traditional statistics in the past.

SPEAKER_02 3:49

Yeah. So like we talk about statistics and maybe if we had a club golfer on here and we asked them about that, they would probably refer to, you know, how many greens did I hit and, you know, how many puts did I have and very generic, but could be helpful in the past just to give you a little bit of an outlay guidance system. But you're kind of saying, I think I'm getting from you is, you know, a little bit of the more detail we put in, the more we're going to get back out. And what we're really looking for is, you know, that finite detail of where we can improve your game. So where it's probably good and where it can we improve? And so the more information we have, those players putting into the statistics apps, the more we're getting back to help them really improve their game. You mentioned there, sorry, one of the biggest challenges for players and indeed coaches is getting players to take the time to put those stats in, right? It's like we put players on these programs, we have these apps and we go, okay, go do this. And it's challenging, right? Especially for club golfers, they have a lot of things going on. As you said, remembering the numbers is one thing, but also just after around taking the time to do that. From inputting data, what's the process on up game? So you mentioned it a little bit there. Can I do that on the golf course? Do I have to do it after the round? And you mentioned about the yardages there. Is the generic yardage enough or do we need to be very exact?

SPEAKER_03 5:07

So as far as really how the diet entry works, you have the option. You can do it both on the golf course or after. Originally, this was really designed to be done post round. And at the very start, the real reasoning behind that is entering your round was also meant to be a moment of reflection on your day, being able to kind of go through each shot on the map of the golf course and think, oh, did I really hit it there? Or was that really the target I chose? And kind of be able to to have that process be done while you're entering your stats. Now, since you have the app pulled up on your phone, you can 100% do it as you're playing. You know, especially on the basic version of the app, you're really just placing your shots. You don't have any additional information to plug in. So you can really just do it, have your phone out, place your shot, move on. It takes you a couple seconds. You can even do it between holes if you don't want to have your phone out every single time. Yeah. from the green to the next tee. pulled up you have it done very very quickly very intuitively

SPEAKER_02 6:13

excellent yeah so one of those kind of maybe issues is some golf courses don't allow phones on the golf course you know so you might be able to do that and what i've done kind of is created this little kind of cheat sheet for the players it's kind of the same size of the scorecard you have just columns and basically you just write down fairway or rough and then just the number and then when you go do later on you can actually come back and just have a rough idea no pun intended on where that ball finished and and again put that data in and you mentioned also the targeting so on one version and there's a really great thing about up game is you have different subscriptions and on the website we'll talk about that a little bit later on but one of them is the pro version and then you mentioned the basic version um how when you were setting up the app did you make sure hey we want a great app that's going to be very insightful but we don't want to make it too complex that the average or the club golfer gets scared and goes oh that's way too much information now as i said you do have the different levels of subscriptions is there any other ways that you manage that or is it just true to subscription

SPEAKER_03 7:15

I mean, the best way really is based on which version of the app you're going to use. Because the pro version has very advanced information. It provides phenomenal insights. But we also recognize, like you said, if you're a club golfer, you've got other things going on than just taking care of your golf game. And so having to enter what club selection you had, what was your target on every single shot you hit for 18 holes, we understand that's probably not something you're going to want to do or have time you might want to but you've got other priorities exactly exactly and so the basic version kind of helps with that and the big thing is i think is a responsibility for everyone in the statistics space nowadays is is educating people on getting them to understand statistics isn't this big bad monster that is going to overwhelm you sort of the way launch monitors were 10, 12 years ago. Everyone knew it was something interesting and provided value, but people were always a little hesitant to dive in because they thought, okay, well, there's all these numbers on the screen when I hit a shot, what do they mean? How do I take out something that's going to make me improve? stats is kind of in this space now right as of today and so it's also on us to obviously try and simplify things as much as we can in the time spent entering your rounds but also afterwards getting to understand okay these are the three main things that happen out there on the course today and i don't need to bother with every single strokes game metric that i hit or every single putting conversion or whatever whatever thing you're looking at and that's that that's a huge thing on making stats more accessible to everyone.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

Yeah, I think that's a really good point because, as you said, people have this outside perspective of, oh, here comes some more information. We already got tons of information. But when you go to a launch monitor, a launch monitor just reflects the information. So if we're out hitting some balls today, we put the launch monitor on, it'll just tell us the numbers. It's not going to tell us whether they were right or wrong to a certain extent. And many players can do many different things and still create efficient golf swings. I think the great thing about statistics apps is it'll actually point out the areas. Now we're going to talk a little bit about the coaching kind of dashboard and how to help students in a second, but it tells you where to look. So as you said, you're not having to look at every single piece of data in the whole thing. It's actually in the app going to show you, no, no, you don't have to worry about numbers one to 12. It's number 13, 14, and puts, let's say between five and 10 feet or, you know, seven or 150 to 175 approach shots, whatever the case may be. It'll actually tell you where to look. And I think one of those big things that I definitely help, it's helped my players, is where do we point them then in practice? So, you know, practice or learning, whatever way you want to phrase it, is such an invaluable part of progression and getting better. And for the most part, we're not great at it, right? So we kind of head out there, we do some technical work, and so the performance side of things can be heavily influenced by what we're discovering in the app, okay? Which I think is fantastic. So when you're looking at the coaching side of things, so a lot of great coaches are using the app. Jeff Smith, one of the coaches and the really, really good ones. I know Jeff and he's doing a great job with the app. If a coach wants to use this in their programs, how does it fit into lessons and development plans?

SPEAKER_03 10:42

Well, we really leave that up to the coach to tell us what their needs are. Because there's a lot of different ways and different structures that are set out. You can have some of the more elite coaches who are going to really rely on this very heavily and want to get all the very in-depth information. And a lot of those coaches will work on it individually. And so coaches can do that and have a player and tell us, okay, I want to have five players to join the app because those are really my top players. and we'll really go in depth with them. Now we also have instances with some of our larger academies where they have even juniors using the app. And in this case, it's less about showing everything to the player. And it's more like the coaches doing the work from the backend, digesting all that information and then taking it to the players with the essentials. And so it just varies pretty extensively, you know, from like an academy and instructor someone with individual clients or then you can have a federation with their national teams or a college program who are going to use all this very differently

SPEAKER_02 11:53

yeah absolutely whoever the customer is kind of depends what you what you want to create and i mentioned it briefly before what i love about the program from my perspective at least is i can create my players add my players into my app and once i connect with them any round they upload i automatically get it I don't have to go chasing them to upload rounds. And then I have my own professional dashboard in terms of a coach. So at any point, any day of the week, I can basically go in and check out reports on any single of those players and see where they need to improve. But what I found, as I mentioned earlier on is fantastic is I can go do that before a session tomorrow. What I have with this player, look at their last five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 rounds, whatever I want. And they go, okay, so that's where we need to focus this session tomorrow. Actually, they're really struggling in this area because they're what they think or what they see. might be different to what's actually happening on the golf course. So perspective is important, right? So they had a poor round yesterday where they put it poorly. They'll come and they'll go, oh, my putting's really bad. I want to work my putting. And we'll have the statistics up there going, actually, you were fantastic in your putting the four rounds before. For whatever reason, yesterday, you got all left to righters and you don't like left to righters. So whatever the case may be, actually, do you know what? Your approach play from 50 to 75 is far more of an issue right now rather than the putting. So let's go work on that.

SPEAKER_03 13:11

Yeah. And I think having that, being able to be connected to your players is great when you're, even if when you don't see them for an extended period of time, you can still keep track of what's going on. You don't have to be there seeing every single shot. We have this, we have a shot tracker feature on the app for when you enter a round and you've submitted it, you can actually go view the shot by shot on the map of the golf course. And as a coach, you can actually go in, even if you were there with your player and see okay well they hit it there on the first and then that was their approach go to like the sixth or seventh hole see okay well they're they made a double there what what club were they hitting or where did they shot end up you know that was it a chip and a three putt or they hit one OB there's you can get all the information about that context and not always have to rely on what the player thinks happened because players tend to be extremely subjective about their games you know that just as much as I do. Yeah. Like you were saying, you know, they'll come up, I put it terrible. Well, you might've missed a couple of short putts, but maybe you put it great from long range and your numbers are actually saying you put it fine.

SPEAKER_04 14:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:23

And it helps you. make things a little more objective on when you're evaluating what's going on

SPEAKER_02 14:30

yeah one of the biggest challenges from a coaching in golf perspective when we talk to other coaches from other sports is going out watching your player play right so if you're a tennis coach it's okay well i can get time to go out if you're kind of an athletics coach okay well i can go to the meets you know if you're a golf coach and you're working with six seven eight nine ten individuals you don't have separate five hour sets to go out and watch the whole round of golf it's tough right so i i find myself kind of the odd time when players will post a score and i'll look at the scorecard and i'll go oh man you finished double double what what did you do instead of asking them and kind of them reliving the events i can actually go into the shot tracker and go okay yeah he pulled his drive penalty shot okay now i know what happened all right cool you know he played okay his approach shot he laid up that was smart okay okay and then you can go talk to them with that context in mind which i think is a very very important part of an aspect of it what's one of the of surprising stats or trends that golfers usually overlook when they see it in up game you know what's one of those ones that you've got feedback of players going um i never even really thought about that before

SPEAKER_03 15:36

I would say a two-part response here. The first one is they don't necessarily think about evaluating frequency. What I mean by that is they don't necessarily pay attention to how frequently they're hitting a certain type of shot. They're just going to look at the strokes gain metrics or maybe the fairways hit, greens, putts, all of that. But they're not necessarily going to take a look, for example, at their approach shots and see the yardage breakdown that you get to see on up game separated by 25 yard increments where it will show you your strokes gained. You also see how many shots you're hitting from each area. So you might be doing very poorly from 50 to 75 yards and doing less, you know, it's, it's less shocking from one 25 to one 50, but you're going to have way more shots from one 25 to one 50. And that becomes the priority to address. Even if just from a numbers perspective, the say the 50 to 75 will look much worse and i would say that's that's really a big one that that players tend to or even coaches tend to tend to look over yeah and this the second part of this this answer is going to be more from game management and just I don't think players understand how much they have to gain by being a little smarter with their game planning and even excellent golfers, even top division one golfers are going to be still losing shots. There's a lot of raw talent out there. Usually the ones who end up making it to the big leagues are the ones who are understanding how to harness their strengths, how to limit their weaknesses. And that comes from just effective game planning, studying the golf course, you know, with, with up games pro version, since you're using your, you're viewing your dispersions in relation to the target, you have the same reference on every single shot. And so with that, you can group them all together and then go use the plan around feature where you can literally overlay your past shot dispersions on any golf course in the world. Even if you've never set foot there, you can go see, okay, how does my driver look on this hole? And I'll move my target. target which will shift my dispersion on the golf course and so they can get a very customized game plan on on this tee I can be pretty aggressive on this one I maybe need to lay back even on approach shots you know a lot of our of our elite amateurs are touring pros who use the app we'll go look at for example par threes and see okay the pin is going to be in this corner on day one day two is going to be different well day one I might be able to be aggressive based on my dispersion pattern from that yardage but I do I need to play safe

SPEAKER_04 18:30

yeah

SPEAKER_03 18:31

and it's it's it's such it seems like such a fine fine detail to be paying attention to which on one shot it is but you stack it over 18 holes and that can be a shot a shot and a half and you're not even hitting better shots you know that's one thing I I try and tell all of our coaches all of our players you don't necessarily need to hit the ball better to get better. There's tons of other ways to make those improvements. And it's much, it's a much lower hanging fruit to have an optimal game plan that trying to gain a shot per round with just raw improvement of having better proximity, being more accurate off the tee, making more putts from five to 10 feet. That's a lot of work. That's a already got is much more attainable

SPEAKER_02 19:28

yeah and it's nearly like a momentum feed right so when you start understanding that that there is that dispersion in effect for every single player in the world no matter who they are how good they are you actually start to improve your ball striking because you become a little bit more confident in what's going to happen when you get that so there's there's nearly that knock-on effect in the technical aspect and i excuse me i think what you mentioned there is very important about you know seeing the frequency especially if you're if you're a golfer that plays a lot at your home club, this can be invaluable because you start seeing what clubs you use. It's nearly like when we're golf coaches on the range and you're like, do you practice with your forehand at all? No, not really. Well, when looking at the daddy, you hit your forehand 10 times in a round. So let's start practicing with that. So little things like that can be really important. And then I imagine then for tournament play, it can be fantastic because you can nearly go back a year and see, okay, what did I kind of, where did I struggle at this tournament last year? or what do I need to be more efficient at? Where did I end up in a lot of the approach play, which is fantastic. You mentioned there a little bit about that shot dispersion. And when I was doing a little webinar with Jeff at one stage, he used a great example, and that was the 17th at Sawgrass. Everybody knows that Island Green. And I think what you're getting at, and we obviously want to describe this as well as we can over a podcast, is say, for example, we're playing that 17th at Island Green. The pin is on the right-hand side, that tucked right position. normally reserved for the Sunday. And if we take our normal dispersion, let's say we're hitting nine iron, let's just say nine iron, for example, and our normal dispersion. And what we do is then we take that dispersion circle. If we hit 25 nine irons and we aim them straight at a target, how many would finish right? How many would finish left? Roughly speaking. And we can then apply that because we put that information in up game and we can apply that over that target and see, you know what? Majority of the time, I actually miss it 10 to 15 yards right of where I normally aim. So for me on that 17 to Sawgrass, if I wanted to make birdie, I got to aim maybe about 10 yards left and allow that kind of fade pattern to perhaps happen. Something along those lines.

SPEAKER_03 21:36

That's spot on. I mean, that's a perfect, perfect example. I mean, it's probably the most telling one because the penalty is so immediate on that hole. Yeah. That Sunday pin, yeah, if you're going to aim right at it, the odds, even for a tour player, are pretty high that you're going to have some misses that end up in the water.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

For sure. And I think one of those other examples of why this is so good and so important is we're going to talk a little bit about the strategic partnership with TrackMan in a second. But I think what's invaluable about this part of the app is a lot of that information, that dispersion information that's creating that data for you is coming from tournament play. Yes. And I think that makes a huge difference in terms of me hitting 57 irons out in the range. And that can be very helpful But having information that is actually coming from tournaments, I think it's far more valuable, right? So then you get really, really accurate, relevant, okay, under the gun, a little bit of pressure, where do I normally miss? Okay, well, that's, you know, having that predictability, that awareness of misses is probably, as you said, it's the low-hanging fruit. Nobody hits it dead straight as we both know.

SPEAKER_03 22:46

Right, no, that's exactly it. And I think it just, those tendencies, you're going to change from one player to the next. You know, you go to 17 at Sawgrass, you might have... two players of the exact same level, one will have a tendency to miss left very frequently. Well, that one can probably go for it pretty aggressively. Now, the one who tends to miss right probably needs to play it a little safer and understand that if they can group those misses in the right way, it'll play to that.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

Yeah, absolutely. So we mentioned a little bit about that strategic partnership with TrackMan. That was very exciting when we kind of saw that happening. I think it was in 2023, I believe, in around then. Yeah, November. Yeah. So with that came some fantastic kind of interaction and data sharing between the two companies. And one of the fantastic ones that came across kind of from my perspective was in Canada here, we do a lot of indoor training during the winter. Can't be outside. And we use Trackman at some of the facilities. And what we start getting then is this nice interaction between Upgame and Trackman in terms of data sharing. So in terms of the dispersion that we mentioned. So that's one of the aspects. What are the other great things that have come from that partnership in terms of using Upgain,

SPEAKER_03 24:02

the app? Well, there's been really two major integrations between UpGame and TrackMan as of now. And we're working on a lot of stuff, which I'm sure will be coming to light in the coming months. And I'm really excited for it. But right now, the first one is for your indoor rounds that you're playing on a simulator on TrackMan. So say it's in the wintertime, you can't really play outdoors. You can connect your TrackMan account on the UpGame app. And as soon as you play a round, it'll automatically provide all your statistics for that round. Like your strokes gained, fairways, greens, all of that. And what's really fantastic about it is there's no data entry needed. You don't have to enter it around. Oh, it just automatically shares. Just automatically does it. Yeah, fantastic. You know, the numbers are probably not going to be as in-depth as you would find them when you're entering around on the golf course and you're putting all these additional details. But it's a great way to bridge the gap of having no information to still having some kind of weight of follow how things are going from one round to the next see okay what are my strokes gain numbers all of that and then the next piece of it is beyond just your simulator rounds you're probably gonna spend some time on track man just hitting shots whether it's in lessons whether it's when you're practicing and that's using shot analysis yes now every shot that you hit on shot analysis that is logged to your account will carry over into up game and you can use that to plan out your your rounds. So by overlaying it on the map of the golf course, as you always been able to do with up game and your on course rounds, you can now do that with your trackman data. So as an example, theoretically, say you're playing a tournament next week, I can go use a trackman today and go hit, you know, 50 drives, 53 woods, you know, even spread it out over the week and, And then I can go to up game, go to plan around, set a date range to the size of the sample I want to take and go to that timeframe. And then boom, I get the shots and I get to see, okay, as of today with my current form, here's how it's going to look on the golf course. So even if you're coming out of the winter, you're still coming out prepared and seeing how your game is going to stack up on any golf course.

SPEAKER_02 26:29

That's amazing. So in theory if I'm playing let's say I have my club championship on Saturday Sunday and we're always as coaches you know nearly trying to get players into that acceptance kind of theory right so it's I think you know when I heard Sean talk a lot about what Tiger did and what he was great at it was nearly that idea that on the round or the morning of a tournament if he didn't feel he quite had it he accepted it okay I'm just going to play with what I have and this is taking that to the next level this is okay I've got the club championship Saturday Sunday I'm hitting balls on Friday I don't really quite feel the swing but what am I doing What's the dispersion? What's the predictability here? As you said, you can put the trackband on, hit 50 shots on it, connect it up, and then that evening you can go through the round tomorrow and go, okay, so if that's the same flight I have tomorrow, that little squirrely fade that I don't love, but it is what it is, I can actually go through the course and actually plan out where I might have to aim to allow for all those things.

SPEAKER_03 27:20

That's fantastic. Perfect example of it. Where I think it becomes very powerful is this is obviously going to be fully personalized for each player. A lot of game management nowadays is being centered around how the tour players are playing, how their shots are going to stack up on a golf course, how you need to aim, which are all phenomenal principles. There's nothing wrong with them. It's just we're applying this in a more personalized way for each individual player so you can be a player and go have your game plan but it's it's it's created for you not using a standard of play that you might not be at for now

SPEAKER_02 28:04

yeah and I think that's the key for any technology that you're using whatever it might be it has to be applicable to you like like indeed you know YouTube gets a bad name sometimes for the golf information but if you have context like you know what you need out of it it can be really good like a library But if you're kind of just looking for that generic fix, it's a bit of a minefield. Just recently, you added some cool updates on the app. The mental process tracking I was really interested in. I kind of saw that there. You mentioned, okay, some new stuff come with Trackman, but kind of explain the latest updates. And then what's the big things coming down the line that we should be looking out for? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:45

So for the mental process first, that's something that we've been working on internally, playing around with for quite a few months now. And essentially just gives players the option when they're entering their rounds to tag for that shot their mental state. And we've left it pretty open-ended of excellent, good, average, poor, very poor. That seems pretty broad, but that's on purpose. Because each player is going to evaluate their mental state in a different way. One player that might be their commitment level another might be how positive their mind their mindset was another might be how clearly did i visualize the golf shot

SPEAKER_04 29:26

yeah

SPEAKER_03 29:27

and so we've kind of left it a little more open-ended But as long as players are entering that with consistency, then they can go look at their numbers and they can filter out their data based on that. So they want to see what does my dispersion pattern look like when I'm in an excellent mindset? I set that and then they can stack a comparison right below it directly on the app and switch it out for when they're in a very poor mindset and see, okay, here's the size of the miss pattern. Here's the strokes, game numbers. Here's the driving distance, the average proximity, however you want to gauge that, but you're able to really sort through it. And I think this can be a really huge step forward with getting players to understand in a more measurable way the importance of being in the right mindset or being mentally sharp. And that's really exciting in the world of stats, which has always been something very cut and dry, very tangible of this is the shot, you hit it, and that's that. Now you're bringing something that's been more so viewed as the unmeasurable aspect of golf and we're really trying to bridge that gap

SPEAKER_02 30:34

yeah yeah i've done a lot of work with kind of breathing training before um with different companies and the challenge being a golf coach trying to make a living also is if a guy came to a lesson or a lady came with a lesson tomorrow and says hey i'm struggling my slice and like okay so let's work on your functional breathing chances are i'm probably not going to see that student ever again so the reason why it's so hard to really as you said tangibly you know really mark the effect of breathing better, or as you said, thinking better. So that's fantastic. You can actually go in and reference, hey, when I was feeling good, looked at dispersions a little narrower, when I may be a little feeling kind of down or not as positive or not as confident. And then you can track, you know, okay, well, was I eating well that day? You can start looking at all those different things that might influence that. I think it's really, really going into nice depth and detail because at the top level, it's that little finite detail, those little numbers that kind of really, really make the differences. And in terms of things coming up that maybe you could talk about or that you can talk about what's happening in the next three, four months or coming into 2026 with Upgame?

SPEAKER_03 31:38

Well, a big focus for us is always try and make the information more accessible, easier to understand. We've taken a big step forward here with our AI insights that we just came out with a few weeks ago here. And essentially what that does is you can use AI, artificial intelligence, to generate a summary of a round that you've just played. And so pretty much it just puts into words what happened. You don't need to look at every single number and know what every single number means to get something out of what just, what you just did out there here, just generate the summary, breaks it down into a couple of paragraphs. It'll tell you your scoring breakdown, the overall strokes gained, but then also it'll show you your top performing area, whether it's T approach, short game or putting, and it will provide a bit of context as to why, for example, you know you did really well on your approach shots well you hit 72 percent of greens today and your average proximity from the fairway was 27 feet and that's why you did so well and then putting might have been a struggle because you lost two strokes on the greens but a shot and a half of that was your 25 to 40 foot range and so then all of a sudden it's not just oh i put it poorly it's more it's got to work on my lag putting yeah instead of just thinking oh i'm terrible at putting and that's that that's not a constructive thing Yeah, absolutely not. And for us, it's really to continue making that evolve and having that applied to maybe a larger data set of information, whether it's a cumulative analysis or studying dispersion patterns. It's pretty endless when you go down that route, but the main direction is making it easier to understand. We need the point of entry to be as easy to get by as possible.

SPEAKER_04 33:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:27

Kind of the same way as it is with the data entry side. If it's hard to do, you can have all the fanciest stats in the world, the most insightful information. Players are not going to get to it because it's too hard to do. And that's a similar vein we're going down with as far as developing the product.

SPEAKER_02 33:47

Okay. In terms of the strokes gained that you use in the app, is it defaulting to a PGA Tour standard? Is there an option to make it more like a 15 to 20 handicap? Or how is that going to look in the future? Are there any plans to do that?

SPEAKER_03 34:00

So right now you've got the option between PGA or LPGA Tour benchmarks. As far as overall benchmark, that's all we have. Now we have a few other ones you can compare yourself to, such as Division I in college, both the men's and women's, the top 50 in WAGR, along with some junior golf benchmarks in Europe. The top 10 players and the average for the players who are competing in the more international tournaments across the country just help them understand the difference there is like one that sounds maybe a little a little crazy at time but the average division one golfer is actually losing two strokes per round to a pj tour golfer interesting you know and you think d1 is that you're just right below tour tour numbers and i mean when you think about it two shots really isn't too much but over out of over four rounds eight shots yeah exactly yeah shots from the field average not even from the winner But we're definitely trying to open up the benchmarking. The big challenge is always, can you get enough data to make it reliable? Yes. And you can't have too much variance. And that's why we haven't really gone just yet into strokes game for handicaps. Because you can have a lot of different handicaps between, you know, some might be, you know, sandbagging a little bit. Yeah. You can have some out there.

UNKNOWN 35:37

No.

SPEAKER_03 35:38

Never. You might have some that have built their handicap at their home course because that's the only place they have time to go play. You can have someone else with the exact same handicap who plays on the road all the time or who plays a lot more events. That standard of golf is going to be very different if you put them on the same golf course. That's why it's still something we're not just yet going into because we haven't found a solution where it's genuinely reliable.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

That's my my one issue with companies like Arcos who advertise all these statistics coming from these club golfers is exactly what you just said. So different golf courses, different parts of the world, different intentions, different practice levels, different levels of difficulty, so many variables within those numbers. You can't be reliable. And when we're looking at data, we're looking for it to be reliable. We got to trust it. If we have a club golfer signs up tomorrow, how many rounds, realistically speaking, that we need to put in before we start getting some nice kind of flow overall data.

SPEAKER_03 36:44

I would say 10 to 15 is a good place to start. Anything less than that, it might be kind of like a trend more in the moment. Obviously, the more you get, the better it's going to be. But 10 to 15, I would say, is a good starting place where you can start looking at the overall data and see, okay, well, this is something that I need to address and I can discuss with my coach.

SPEAKER_04 37:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:08

Or that I can work on by myself, however it is. Now, with Upgame, as far as practicing, it's become even better to stay connected with your coach because there's a practice section where you can create drills and assign them to players. So once you've kind of built that baseline of information, you can start building out a practice plan and going to take a look and see, okay, well, I'm really having a hard time from 125 to 150. Let's see what we can work on. Is it going to be maybe a more performance-based exercise or is it going to be more technical work? You really have the option to play around with that and see what's the best fit.

SPEAKER_02 37:45

Yeah, and you can create your own drills as a coach and just assign them to different players at different times too, which can be very, very helpful. I think when you're looking at this, as we mentioned at the very start, the challenge is going to be people taking the time. But from my perspective and the way I try to explain it is, all right, well, you could spend an hour on the driving range working on your golf swing, like really putting effort in. You know, it's really hot these last couple of weeks in Canada here, so it's going to take a lot of energy. Or versus the hour, you could take 10 minutes and put in the data from the previous round. Now, what we're saying is if you start doing the 10 minutes you might have really good improvement you're definitely going to have more awareness of what you're doing on the golf course so let's just say that factually that can't be argued if you start tomorrow and you start going okay let's play 15 rounds get on the up game app spend 10 minutes after each round putting in the data which is about the number it takes if you're kind of efficient with it once you get used to it that's going to benefit you massively in terms of knowing and learning your game and where you need to focus to get better and if you know where you need to focus to better the hour of practice you can probably get the same amount done in about 10 minutes or 15 minutes because you're being more efficient so it's it's kind of you start looking at in these ways you start understanding okay well hey my initial reaction is oh another thing to do i gotta put in the data i'm like well no actually you can start actually being way more efficient with your time and actually probably spending less time especially for those golfers maybe that don't practice hey i don't have time to practice like okay well if you have 10 minutes to put in the round this might help you just get better without practicing so There's so much benefit to come from this. I think it's just really players need to kind of jump in and just try it out and get a little look at it. And one of the things that attracted me to this app versus a few other ones was the subscriptions. And the fact that for us in Canada here, and I know you mentioned TrackMan and the indoors is fantastic, but you do have a six month subscription. So you have the basic and the pro subscriptions and you do have a six months available. So, you know, any players that are like, you know, I only play from like, you know, March or April. people really true to September October like well this is perfect for you six months subscription get on it you know and it's it's not that expensive we won't list the prices because there's so many different people from different countries who just would confuse people um so I I think it's fantastic now before we tell kind of golfers where they can go sign up and give me that last pitch why why up game for club golfers why have they got to do it in general and why it versus the other apps for yourself

SPEAKER_03 40:12

Well, first, why upgrade? I would say maybe why stats in the first place. And that just goes to what you were just saying. You're going to be more efficient with your time. And you're going to be more efficient also with what you're getting out of lessons. Because let's be honest, for a lot of golfers, whether they're recreational or playing at a high level, there's some kind of investment being made. Whether it's time, whether it's money, you can really optimize that. You can get more out of what you're putting into it of just optimizing what you're doing understanding how you operate out on the golf course having better practice plans clearer communication with your coaches and that really all blends together and is why you want to do this. Now, why up game, you're gonna have very simple and very intuitive data entry. And also you're gonna be able to view some metrics that you're not gonna find anywhere else with your target base dispersions, with the end shot result that you can tag beyond just the lie to help with the context of the variables you come up, you face on the golf course. And then obviously the partnership with TrackMan is something you're not going to find anywhere else of being able to take what you're doing on TrackMan off the golf course and take it out there and have it benefit you in real time when you actually need it to and you're sitting up for a shot.

SPEAKER_04 41:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:36

Yeah, no, absolutely fantastic points in terms of what's happening. And as you said, like personally, I think it's the best app out there for coaches. It's really helped me with my students. And we haven't really gotten into the fine, fine detail of how good this thing can be you know and because we want to kind of make this this is for club golfers and for coaches so we don't want to go crazy into the detail but if you are a golf coach there's an awful lot more to this um the team at up game you and yourself all the other guys have been absolutely fantastic to me very helpful always good with support and stuff so if you're a coach and you want that and that's important to you which it is they're at the team at up game are fantastic very very helpful always keen to lend a hand and explain things and that and keep you updated so and the thing i love about the app too we mentioned earlier on our the updates. So I always like companies that I work with to continuously be, hey, how can we get better? Because I'm kind of looking in the same way, right? So how can we improve? How can we develop this? So anybody that's doing that is always going to be a plus in my book. Ewan, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate that. So if people want to sign up, what's the website?

SPEAKER_03 42:41

So the website is going to be www.upgame.app, not.com. It's just a bit of a quirk there. You can find a lot of the information, get some info on how the subscriptions work. We also have a YouTube channel where we're putting out a lot of videos with information about how the platform works, covering some information about just... data how it's used by the pros we try and do a lot of case studies to put into a more real context so definitely go take a look there and you can also find us on instagram and linkedin where we're we're trying to be very active put out a lot of information not just about up game about stats in general uh just because we feel the the more people know the the better it's going to be for everybody

SPEAKER_02 43:23

yeah the instagram as you mentioned there some of the stats are cool you go pj tour versus different tours you go into why scotty scheffler is beyond doubt the best player in world at the moment all those great things which which i find fascinating i'm sure many other club golfers do so ewan thank you again for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us today as i said you guys from my perspective are doing fantastic job and i highly encourage anybody who's not come across up game to go check it out explore it it's not crazy expensive it's very affordable so go on that six month and then try it out and you won't be sorry you'll see the benefits straight away so thanks mate i really appreciate

SPEAKER_03 43:59

you joining us yeah steve thanks so much for the time thank you for all the kind words and yeah hope to see you soon cool man alright thanks

SPEAKER_02 44:08

alright so that wraps up another episode massive thanks to Ewan from UpGame for coming on the show the more I teach really the more I'm appreciative of solving the low hanging fruit for players especially those players that don't have an awful lot of spare time to really practice and the UpGame app does exactly that it directs you in the right place on what you need to practice to improve so for club golfers the payback is well worth the time and for the golf coaches if you really look for ways to improve your players performance and the efficiency of the time you're spending with them on the range then this really is a must again it creates a nice plan of improvement so for more information or to sign up to Upgame go to the website www.upgame.app and for some great insights on how the best in the world are performing check out the Upgame social platforms as always big thank you to the listeners out there as without you listening and downloading these podcasts there wouldn't be a show I really appreciate the support and the feedback and just a reminder if you do enjoy it please make sure to rate the show on either Apple Podcasts or Spotify As always, if you want to work with myself in person or online, or indeed have any questions on golf or even the podcast, you can contact me on Instagram at stevemoregolf or through the website stevemoregolf.com. Finally, for your own game, don't forget, work hard, work diligently, but most importantly, work smart, and we'll talk to you again soon.