Live From The Open Championship: SMT Ball Location Data Makes Open Debut By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Thursday, July 14, 2022 - 11:44 am
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SMT's Golf Lead Ryan McDonald and a team of 24 are on site at the 150th Open Championship with something new for an Open Championship: the resting location for every shot that gets hit.
It's something the R&A has been looking at for a number of years and we were just trying to find the right time to add it, says McDonald. It improves their digital product, improves their broadcast product, and even improves their rules team and course preparation and planning.
SMT Operations Specialist Mary Grace Venable and Golf Lead Ryan McDonald inside SMT's cabin at the 150th Open Championship.
Getting the X, Y, and Z coordinates of a ball's resting location and then mapping it in the 3D world makes it a lot easier to calculate distances of how far the ball has travelled or how many yards are still left to reach the pin. And it's a process that involves a mix of manual and automated workflows. It begins with a scorer who walks the entire 18 holes with a group and can send notifications to the spotters on a given hole that an impending shot is incoming.
Laser pointers across the Old Course are bringing a new level of accuracy to ball locations.
In the landing areas there is a team of two and there is a spotter with a tablet who gives a preliminary estimate on a grid map of where they think the ball is resting, says McDonald. Then there is a laser operator using a survey-style laser to shoot the actual coordinates and give a more precise location. For the par fives there will be three teams.
Within 10 to 15 seconds of the ball coming to rest the data is then populated into the SMT system and distributed to various entities, including digital productions, broadcasters, and even the on-course video board operations.
We have staff that are monitoring our wireless network for all those handheld devices, and we have teams that are validating the data to make sure its accurate, adds McDonald. We also have part of our team doing the display production on the 17 green-side digital walls and even a team helping the manual scoreboards. So, there's a traditional and digital aspect of this event as things like the yellow scoreboard are iconic.
Handheld digital devices make it easy for spotters on the course to log information related to on-course action.
McDonald says about 90% of the work done at The Open is for the R&A but some work is also being done on the European Tour Productions world feed and NBC who are managing the telecast.
We have a full-course wind system that we deploy on the golf course that's tagging real time shots with the wind conditions, says McDonald. And there's a graphics interface that we've given ETP for displaying the real-time wind conditions that are out there.
The explosion of digital distribution has been a big driver of next-generation statistics.
The mindset has changed from things being done just for the broadcast to being shared across multiple display devices and now it's about how do we connect people across the world to their favorite player and give them everything just like they would have if they were on site. So, one challenge is to increase the timeliness of how fast the data comes in and that is probably our next evolution.
The use of data and things like ball speed, spin rate, apex, ball location, and more are becoming a bigger part of the golf viewing experience, whether on TV or digital devices. McDonald says the biggest challenge is figuring out how to automate the vast number of data points that are gathered on from golf courses which are all unique and have unique holes as well.
Every hole is like a fingerprint and that's the challenge that golf presents more so than any other sport when it comes to automating it, he says. It takes a lot more people and a lot more staff to collect the data set as it would more of an arena-style sport.
McDonald clearly watches a lot of golf and also sees where the new opportunities lie for the future.
The next evolution will be taking the radar, club speed and ball speed and projecting where a ball is going to go based on that spin rate and club speed while it is in the air he explains. And then being able to show the impact the wind actually has on a shot is the X factor that every player talks about. For example, today the winds are calm and we're seeing some low scores, including a 64. But when the wind picks up, that wind becomes the X factor. So how will that wind impact a professional golfer and how can we have analytics around how difficult a shot is based on the conditions?
Like baseball, basketball, and football before it the quality of analytics will only continue to improve for golf, especially as more and more data scientists (and coaches, players, and fans) crunch the numbers and begin to fully understand them.
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Live From The Open Championship: SMT Ball Location Data Makes Open Debut By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
