09 July 2021: Sunday, the 4th of July, will be remembered as a red-letter day in the short history of UpGame, the performance-enhancement app developed in India and taking the golf world by storm.
It marked the first time when two UpGame clients, on two of the biggest golf Tours in the world, won the title on the same day.
Even before the celebrations finished following Australian Lucas Herbert’s sensational wire-to-wire win at the Dubai Duty Free Irish Open on the European Tour, his Aussie compatriot Cameron Davis outlasted a three-man play-off to triumph at the Rocket Mortgage Classic on the PGA Tour.
UpGame is a statistics-based game improvement system where a player is able to track his/her performance on the course, in practice, and connect with coaches.
“It was the most satisfying day for us since we launched UpGame in 2018. It’s been a very intense journey for us, especially navigating the through the challenges of the pandemic, but days like this just shows us our team’s focus and resilience are paying off” said Sameer Sawhney, founder and CEO of UpGame.
“Along with Tom Boys, who is also our Lead Analyst and Product Head, the team has just kept its head down and plugged away at creating a better product. We have taken in a lot of feedback from top professionals who use our products, elite amateurs, and even regular club golfers, and integrated it to make UpGame a must-have for any golfer who wants to become better.”
Herbert, winner of the Omega Dubai Desert Classic last year, produced crunch golf down the stretch on Sunday at Mount Juliet to eventually win by three shots.
The 25-year-old, a resident of Orlando, Florida, who has risen to No55 in the Official World Golf Rankings, was thankful for the role UpGame has played in his career so far.
Speaking after his Irish Open win, Herbert said: “UpGame is such good value for money for me. Playing every week out there, it gives me a such good indications of where the trends are in my game. It is so in-depth in its analysis and so relevant to how we are playing the golf courses.
“It can be a great feedback for the caddie even. If it looks like I am missing a lot on the short side, he can come back and say we can get more conservative with the targets around the greens.
“There are so many areas of UpGame that is so good, and so much better than anything I have ever used before. It’s so invaluable.”
UpGame is available in two versions – Basic and Pro – on both iOS and Android. It has been built to make data collection easy, quick and visual. It gives all the analysis a PGA Tour player gets from ShotLink, and it can be shared directly with the coach via the app.
In the Pro version, it collects some unique Moneyball-style metrics like dispersions against targets and target lines, as well as quantification of end results into easy, medium or hard categories.
Dispersion against target lines in tee shots help to measure the dispersion against a fixed point instead of depending on fairway width, which can be drastically different in different golf courses.
Similarly, dispersion to targets in approach shots is critical to measure as well as opposed to just measuring proximity to the flag, as very often, players play away from the flag. In a case study, an UpGame user on the European Tour realised his proximity to target was a lot better than his proximity to the actual flag, letting his coach and caddie build a slightly more aggressive strategy for the player.
The quantification of end-result statistic allows players to understand if their misses were in easy, medium or hard spots and can thereby attribute correctly strokes lost in the short game. For example, to bad shot execution or just being in an impossible situation which could be due to short siding oneself.
The app has been powering some of the hottest players in the game like England’s Matt Wallace and Marcus Armitage, and the sensational South African duo Garrick Higgo and Wilco Nienaber. Boys personally works with Tommy Fleetwood, Jason Day, Wallace, Charl Schwartzel and others.
