Arccos Golf launches Coaches Dashboard with powerful visualization features

Arccos Golf launches the Arccos Coaches Dashboard using powerful visualization tools while informing lesson plans, practice regimens, pre-tournament strategies, and equipment decisions.

The Arccos Coaches Dashboard is a free, web-based platform that allows PGA Professionals, college coaches and other instructors to easily access, analyze and understand all of their students’ on-course performance data.

“Almost all of the world’s best players and their coaches use on-course performance data to inform their practice regimens and tournament strategies,” said Sal Syed, Arccos CEO and Co-Founder on the company’s blog.

“Now, every instructor and any player can benefit from the same type of factual, non-biased insights. This means much more efficient lessons, greater student satisfaction and enhanced revenue opportunities for coaches,” he added.

Winner of the Golf Digest Editor’s Choice Award for “Best Game Analyzer,” three years running, the Arccos platform combines automatic data capture and advanced analytics to help golfers of all skill levels make smarter decisions and shoot lower scores.

Technical features of the Arccos Coaches Dashboard include:

• Advanced analytics for every game aspect
• Strokes Gained analysis for driving, approach, chipping, sand & putting
• Accuracy and performance data for every club and distance
• Player performance trend identification
• Powerful visualizations for Smart Distance club gapping

The Coaches Dashboard leverages its award-winning Arccos 360 performance tracking system to automatically record and analyze every shot a player takes during each round.

“With the Arccos Coaches Dashboard, instructors can use on-course performance data to connect with their students in ways that weren’t previously possible,” said Bob Ford, Arccos Advisory Board Chair and General Manager at the Seminole Golf Club.

“Coaches now have streamlined access to data-driven insights for every player. When play on the course dictates what happens on the lesson tee, a total paradigm shift in coaching begins,” he added.

Arccos’ AI-powered Caddie

Last year, the company’s AI-powered caddie, Arccos Caddie, was updated with refined machine learning and AI algorithms to ensure that Arccos Caddie users could shoot lower scores by harnessing advanced analytics to make smarter, data-driven decisions on the course.

Read More: AI is replacing traditional golf caddie with data-driven results

Developed in partnership with Microsoft, Arccos Caddie shows a player their optimal strategy on any hole in the world. Its AI engine is fueled by golf’s richest data set, which includes over 100 million shots hit during 750,000+ rounds played by the Arccos community, and 418 million GPS mapping data points on 40,000+ courses worldwide.

In April Arccos teamed-up with Microsoft’s Commercial Software Engineering (CSE) team “to develop a novel method for rapidly pre-labeling training data for image segmentation models,” according to Clemens Wolff on the Microsoft Developer Blog.

“Arccos came to us with the objective of detecting all the trees on a golf course, and so we reformulated the problem as ‘can we detect a playable area on a golf course?'” said Wolff in the above video.

In other words, the problem was how to map out and visualize obstacles on a golf course in order to help the golfer take the best shots.

Microsoft Software Development Engineer Margaret Meehan explained the results succinctly:

“We helped them develop a machine learning algorithm, so that a golfer can figure out their best course of action and how to get from tee to cup in the best possible way.”

“By making more training data available, we generalized Arccos’ deep learning model and thus improved the virtual caddie’s performance,” wrote Wolff.

Based on the success of Arccos Caddie and its position as a thought-leader in the golf industry, Arccos was recently named among the “World’s Most Innovative Companies 2018” by Fast Company, ranking third in the Sports category.

In an interview on Chief Executive last month, the Arccos CEO talked about his company’s partnership with Microsoft and how partnerships should be mutually beneficial.

“We want to make our partner successful and then we want to make sure that the way the partnership is structured also helps Arccos,” said Syed.

“But I would say partners come first. And that mindset helps us get to a point where it’s beneficial for both parties and equally, or mutually beneficial. And it’s not a one-sided deal where we’re getting in there, only for our benefit. And I think, to me, that’s key,” he added.

The newly-launched Arccos Coaches Dashboard eliminates the need to rely on a student’s post-round feedback or much-flawed manual data-collection protocols.

It allows a coach to review a round shot-by-shot, providing a factual, non-biased and data-driven platform to underpin coaching strategies.