LogansDad said:
I guess a good place to start would be to figure out the answer to this question.
GPS is probably the most important. I had no idea there was a cell phone app that could do swing analysis.... that's crazy.
I was looking into
Game Golf, but it's $200 and I'm not sure how much it will actually help me. I think my biggest problem right now is that I have literally no idea how far I hit my irons of the fairway, so I don't trust my distances and end up overswinging, which leads to awful duffing. Gonna try to hit the driving range a few times this week to start working on that.
Being single is pretty awesome.
There's a few free GPS apps - I can't rate them as I don't use them (I have a Garmin watch, which I love and can't recommend enough), but download a couple and play around with them. You can use them to help calculate your distances roughly.
Game Golf I got for Christmas and while I've only played twice with it so far, I can see it will be pretty useful when I have a larger sample size to work with. Once I do, it will begin to toss out bad shots and other data points which are clearly outliers. You can find it on EBay for closer to ~~$160, less if you get a used model. The biggest thing for me is remembering to check in before my shots. I'm working on incorporating a pre-shot routine this season and am trying to work it into that, but so far I'm at about 75% remembering.
As for swing apps, there's devices like Zepp that will help with swing analysis or if you want to drop a little coin, things like the newest model Garmin watch includes swing analysis. It's not cheap, I think about $400, but two birds with one stone and all that.
There's been good advice so far about ranges and I kind of sit in the middle. I agree that the balls can lead to misleading information, but I also agree with jercra that a range session with a range finder can be valuable to you - you will still learn the relative distance of your clubs and can use that on the course. If your 6 iron is consistently getting you to the 150 marker at the range, well, you probably don't need to hit that club from 150 on the course and you can work backwards. Also, when you're at the range, if at all possible, avoid hitting off the turf mats. Especially if you are having trouble striking your irons, the mats can be a detriment as the over correct poor contact. If you hit an inch behind the ball on a mat, the club slides and you still make decent contact. If you hit an inch behind the ball on grass, you chunk it and the ball goes half as far. Always try to find grass at the range if you can.
In the meantime, use your rounds to help with your distances. If you're just getting back into it and honestly don't care about your scores, then get in the right frame of mind to swing easy and make good contact. Instead of overswinging and duffing it, take an extra club and swing easy. Use the next few rounds to work out what that means for your yardages. Oh and have fun. You've earned it man.