Bring the problem, not the diagnosis.
You are going to be tempted to figure out why you slice it. Do not. You are the worst-placed person in the world to work that out, because you are standing inside the swing.
Track what the ball does. That is a thing you can actually see. The why is a coach's job, and handing them clean data is worth about twenty minutes of a lesson you paid for.
Log what happened. Do not guess at why it happened.
"I topped 9 out of 30" is data. "I'm topping it because I'm lifting my head" is a theory, and it is probably wrong, and you will spend a month practicing a fix for a problem you do not have.
The tracker is built into the Range Session. This page is the standalone version, plus why any of this matters.
Why not diagnose it yourself?
Here is the thing nobody tells beginners: the feeling of your swing and the reality of your swing are two different objects. They are related, loosely, the way a photograph is related to a place. Everyone who has ever been filmed swinging a golf club has had the same reaction, which is some version of "that is not what it felt like at all."
So when you top a ball and think "I lifted my head", you are constructing a story from the inside of a system you cannot see. That story is usually wrong. Lifting your head is the most-cited cause of topping the ball and it is very rarely the actual cause. Meanwhile you go practice keeping your head down, which introduces a second problem on top of the first one, and now you have two.
- "Topped it" (you watched it skitter along the ground)
- "Hit the ground first" (you saw the divot behind the ball)
- "Curved right" (you watched it curve right)
- "Felt good" (it did)
- "I came over the top"
- "My swing path is out to in"
- "I'm casting"
- "I lifted my head"
- "My weight shift is late"
Everything in the right column is a cause. Causes require someone watching you from the outside, ideally with a camera and some training. Everything in the left column is an effect, and effects are visible to you, for free, standing right there.
A coach's first job in a first lesson is finding out what your ball does. If you walk in and say "here is 60 shots worth of tracking, topping was 40% of my misses and it is worst with the long clubs", you have handed them the answer to the question they were about to spend twenty minutes working out.
That is twenty minutes of a lesson you paid for, given back to you, spent on fixing instead of finding.
The six things worth logging
That is the whole list. It is short on purpose. A tracker with thirty categories is a tracker nobody uses past the second bucket.
| Log | What you saw | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| Felt good | Solid contact, roughly where you aimed. | Log these too. A session that is only misses is a lie about your golf. |
| Topped it | Low screamer along the ground, or barely airborne. | Your swing is bottoming out in the wrong place. Same family as hitting the ground early. |
| Hit ground | Club hit turf before ball. Big divot, ball goes nowhere. | Also a bottoming-out problem. These two travel together and share a cause more often than not. |
| Curved right | Started okay, bent right. (Left for lefties.) | The classic. Face and path disagree. Genuinely hard to self-diagnose, easy for a coach. |
| Curved left | Bent hard left. (Right for lefties.) | Same family as above, mirrored. Less common in beginners. |
| Just weird | Sideways, whiffed, or no word for it yet. | Not a failure of the tracker. A pile of these usually points at setup rather than swing. |
The temptation is to only tap a button when something goes wrong, because that is when you are annoyed enough to reach for your phone. That produces a record that says you are terrible at golf, which is both inaccurate and demoralising.
Log the good ones. The ratio is the interesting part, and you cannot have a ratio with one number.
Standalone tracker
If you are not running a full Range Session and just want to count as you go, use this. It saves in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Your recent sessions
Sessions you finish in the Range Session tool land here. It is a local record, stored in this browser only, and it disappears if you clear your browsing data.
Your one thought for today
Built from what you have actually tracked, not from general advice. If you have not logged enough for this to say anything personal, it says so and sends you to the Cheat Sheet, which is purpose-built for mid-round lookup and already does that job better than a second panic page would.
What to do with the pattern
Once you have a few sessions logged, one of three things will be true.
One miss dominates
More than about 40% of your misses are the same thing. This is the best case, oddly, because a pattern is a fixable object. Take it to a coach in exactly those words: "my miss is X, it is most of my misses, here is the count."
Everything is scattered
No clear pattern, a bit of everything. Usually means the fundamentals have not settled yet rather than one thing being broken. Setup is the first suspect: grip, posture, ball position, alignment. Boring, and almost always where it lives.
It depends on the club
Fine with wedges, a disaster with the driver. Extremely common and completely normal, because the long clubs punish the same error much harder. Worth telling a coach, because it narrows things down fast.
Tracking is a diagnostic tool, not a lifestyle. Once you know your pattern, you do not need to keep counting it every session. Log a session now and then to see whether it has moved. Golf is supposed to be four hours outside with your friends, not a data-entry job.