The hole claimed another victim but this one goes in the record books.
Beau Hossler was not the first, and he will definitely not be the last.
During the second round of the 2024 Players Championship, Hossler etched his name in the record books at TPC Sawgrass, but not in the way he would want it.
He hit the 1,000th ball in the water at the par-3 17th hole since 2003, when ShotLink began tracking shots at the hole.
While Ryan Fox made the 14th ace on the 17th in the first round Thursday, Hossler’s shot hit the back of the green before hopping into the water long on Friday.
It’s important to note, since ShotLink didn’t begin tracking data on the hole until 2003, there have been plenty of golf balls to find the drink over the years that aren’t “on record.” That’s why Hossler’s name is attached to the record.
Beau Hossler's tee shot found the water on No. 17.
The good news, Hossler, who turns 29 on Saturday, was able to get up and in for bogey, keeping him just below the projected cutline with nine holes to play.
But a double-bogey 6 on the fourth hole, his 13th of the day after starting on the back nine, led to a 1 over total, putting Hossler two shots off the projected cutline of 1 under.
The funding will allow Arccos to accelerate the release of products and data-driven services for recreational golfers.
Golfers on the PGA Tour have nearly all their shots tracked by ShotLink, which uses a sophisticated system of laser measuring devices, radar and an army of volunteers. You don’t have access to that technology, but Arccos has been enabling recreational golfers to track their shots and collect data on their game since 2012, and on Monday, the company announced that as a part of a $20 million Series C fundraising, it had become the “Official Game Tracker” of the PGA Tour.
Along with the investment by the Tour, other investors include Ping, TaylorMade, Cobra Puma Golf and Topgolf Callaway Brands.
Arccos, which is based in Stamford, Connecticut, is a shot-tracking system that uses a series of small screw-in tags to tether a golfer’s clubs to a smartphone app, which then uses GPS to track the location of every shot a player hits, along with information on the club used and the location of the bullet hit (fairway, sand, rough, the green). Using that data, Arccos develops ShotLink-style stat packages that can reveal information about player tendencies, strengths and weaknesses, along with suggestions on what to practice. The Arccos Caddie app can also use that data to provide caddy-style club recommendations too.
Data provided by Arccos
“This investment shows that data is here to stay and that it is going to help everybody,” said Sal Syed, Arccos Golf’s CEO and co-founder in an exclusive interview with Golfweek. “Whether you are a player looking to improve or an instructor looking to teach better, a fitter looking to be smarter or even a manufacturer looking to make better tools for golfers, this data is going to help every aspect of the industry. That’s why you are seeing the industry kind of coalescing behind Arccos. It’s going to help everybody.”
To date, Arccos members have used the system to track more than 750 million shots during over 16 million rounds in 162 countries. That database provides the foundation for the power of the system.
Asked what Arccos plans to do with the capital it has raised, Syed said the infusion of money will allow the company to accelerate its product roadmap.
“We can invest more in data science, make the system more accurate, easier to use and more available to a wider array of golfers.”
Arccos Gen3+ (Arccos)
Players on the Tour now create strategies for how they will play specific holes using data collected by ShotLink, and many modify their schedules to include courses that data shows match their game especially well. In some cases, they skip tournaments where data shows they might struggle. Syed hopes that as Arccos grows, recreational golfers will be able to make data-based decisions like the pros.
“Every decision that is made in golf should be based on your on-course, real performance,” he said. “Eventually, we want to be able to show, using data, which putter is better for you, what shoes you should play with. Today, no one is basing those kinds of decisions on actual performance data. What we have touched is not even the tip of the iceberg.”
History will be made at Pebble Beach in a variety of ways this summer.
History will be made at Pebble Beach in a variety of ways this summer. As the best women in the world descend on the iconic course for the first time at the 78th U.S. Women’s Open, every shot that’s hit will be digitally tracked and archived. The U.S. Golf Associations’ new USGA ShotCast Powered by Cisco, which utilizes the PGA Tour’s ShotLink system, will be available at both the men’s and women’s U.S. Opens.
This marks the first time ShotLink data will be available at a women’s professional event.
Fans won’t miss a moment of the action with 3D hole imagery that provides real-time radar data and shot shapes from the game’s best. Users can follow along both on the championship website and the app. While information such as clubhead speed, ball speed and smash factor are available weekly in the men’s game, such detailed data is new technology for the women.
With advanced 3D imagery, fans will even be able to change angles on a particular shot, zooming into the player’s perspective, such as measuring the undulation and slopes as players line up their putts.
Currently on the LPGA, caddies are paid to record data from their players that’s used for the KPMG Performance Insights, an analytics system that provides information such as strokes gained statistics. There is no way, however, to track how a player makes her way around the golf course or the specifics of each swing.
The USGA’s ShotCast will archive every televised shot within the feature for both championships.
The PGA Tour developed ShotLink more than 20 years ago. The system is operated by a small staff and each week on Tour, roughly 350 volunteers work to score the golf tournament. The PGA Tour estimates its annual ShotLink volunteer count at around 10,000.
PGA Tour partners with Amazon to boost ShotLink capabilities while also developing an easier-to-use system that could work on for the LPGA.
Collin Morikawa was not walking the fairways at the Albany Golf Club or hanging out at the beach the Monday before the Hero World Challenge, Tiger Woods’ event in the Bahamas. He was 15 miles northwest of the Las Vegas Strip at TPC Summerlin, along with Michelle Wie West, Max Homa, Danielle Kang, Harry Higgs, David Duval, Graeme McDowell and a host of other PGA Tour and LPGA Tour players.
Caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay was there, too, as the emcee of the first AWS Golf Invitational, a corporate pro-am for Amazon Web Services and Deloitte VIPs in town for a massive conference. And all of them were about to become guinea pigs for new technology that potentially could change how golf fans watch and interact with the sport and data on multiple tours.
The PGA Tour is king of the mountain when it comes to collecting data from all the shots players hit during most Tour events. Using ShotLink, developed in 2003, the Tour can provide fans with detailed information about where players hit the ball, all in or close to real time. It’s an expensive system that requires a lot of boots on the ground to produce, and currently ShotLink is out of reach for the PGA Tour Champions, Korn Ferry Tour and the LPGA Tour.
Collin Morikawa at TPC Summerlin (David Dusek/Golfweek)
To make similar data available beyond the PGA Tour, the Tour and its partners are working to develop a lighter, less-expensive shot-tracking and statistics platform for the Korn Ferry Tour and Champions Tour while simultaneously developing the next generation of ShotLink.
Enter Amazon Web Services and all those pros and pro-am guests at TPC Summerlin, site of the PGA Tour’s Shriners Children’s Open. They were part of a beta test of the new system, and I was the only reporter onsite to get a first look at a system that might revolutionize how golf fans are able to interact with the sport on multiple tours.
It’s all part of a plan to help the PGA Tour and other tours attract new viewers with enhanced engagement, either through a better, modernized ShotLink that utilizes Amazon’s vast computing network, or through a new alternative system that might best be described as ShotLink Lite. And fans already have been given a taste.
In March the PGA Tour announced it was entering a new partnership with AWS and gave golf lovers a preview. During the 2021 Players Championship – while another Tour partner, CDW, helped it gather data on the course – AWS powered Every Shot Live, an app that gave fans the ability to see every shot hit by each player in a tournament. That was more than 32,000 shots in real time, a massively complex data and computing job. AWS’ powerful cloud-based tools and infrastructure helped make it possible.
