Golf Magazine USA – September 2019

77

Salman “Sal” Syed, golfing futurist, dreams of a day when you, with your

16.3 index and your 88-mile-an-hour clubhead speed, will actually know how far you hit your 8-iron.

Because Syed’s company, after looking at about 100 million regular-joe golf shots since 2014, has

figured out the single biggest difference between them and us: The Tour players are realists, and we’re dreamers.

“They know what their clubs will do,” says Syed, born and raised in Pakistan, educated at Ohio Wesleyan

(math major, tennis player) and the Yale School of Management. “We idealize our best shots.” It’s a far, far

better thing to know that your true median 8-iron goes 132 yards, and to accept that the 8-iron you stiffed from

161 in your last round is, in fact, an outlier. “The Tour pros are an inspiration, but they play a different game,”

Syed explains. The rest of us, he says, need to “overcome our cognitive biases.”

You can do it! And Syed and his people—30 or so employees of Arccos, the company he co-founded—are here

to help. As Brandel Chamblee often says, “This is the era of big data.” Arccos (its name is a math term) has for

six years sold nickel-sized grip-cap sensors that record the distance you hit every shot and its final resting place.

It gathers that data, tidies it up and returns it to you usefully. “Our goal is for the golfer to make data-driven

decisions, not ego-driven ones,” Syed says.

But what of all that data? Arccos has recorded 100 million golf shots from its 250,000 customers. It knows

more about average players—you!—than perhaps any other company in existence. It’s like PGA Shotlink for

schlubs. And it’s evolving.

“We’re in the first inning of what this data can show golfers about their decision-making,” Syed says. “We’re

going to introduce the most advanced analytics framework an amateur golfer can access.”

SAL

SYED

HAS LOTS OF

GOOD NEWS

ABOUT

YOUR GAME

BY MICHAEL BAMBERGER & JEFF RITTER Photography by Scott McDermott

His company, Arccos, has amassed a trove of detailed performance

data on the weekend golfer, and what you’ll learn from it will greatly

enhance your play (but not, alas, your lame driving distance).

Syed and his
Arccos sensors
can home in so
precisely on your
length and swing
tendencies that
pulling, say, an
8- or a 7-iron will
no longer be a
toss-up.

Your Data GOLF/Technology 2019