Sunday, November 20, 2011

Can a flagstick prevent a hole-in-one?

I was told many years ago that the flagstick makes a difference with holing out good chip shots. Ed Vietmeier was the golf pro at Duquesne Golf Club and he showed me that the larger 1 inch flag sticks rejected many of his hard putts where as the ½ inch flagsticks allowed most of them to drop. Because of this, I decided to set up a simple test using the Pelz Meter to see if golf balls would in fact bounce off flagsticks differently according to their design.

To conduct this test, we use three different sets of pins and a regulation cup. We set up our Pelz Meter, which is similar to a Stimp Meter, one foot away from the center of the cup. We rolled 30 balls down the Pelz Meter at each of the flagsticks. We removed a ball from the cup every time one landed in it to make sure the balls leaning against the flagstick didn’t have any effect on vibration or stability. We wanted to simulate a chip shot as it hits the flagstick. It was important to make sure all the balls hit the flagstick dead-on and at the same speed to see how the ball would react.

After rolling 90 balls down the Pelz Meter, the results were in. With the ½ flagstick we used this year 93% of the balls fell into the cup. With the old 3/4 inch tapered flagstick, 80% of the balls fell into the cup. The old 1 inch aluminum flagstick that had been used at the club before my employment had only 20% of the balls fell into the cup. The complaints that I had heard throughout the years turned out to be valid. With these results, I decided to check on hole-in-ones and found some very interesting statistics.

Valley Brook had the following hole-in-ones over the following five year periods:

1995 – 1999 - 34 hole-in-ones - ½ flagsticks were in use
2000 – 2004 - 16 hole-in-ones - 1 inch aluminum flagsticks were in use
2005 – 2009 - 32 hole-in-ones - ½ flagsticks were in use

The one inch flagsticks were used from 2000 – 2004 backing up the study that I conducted. Have you noticed a difference or have you every thought of a flagstick actually could make a difference?

Please watch the following video to see the demonstration that a flagstick really can make a difference.