We're on a mission to help golfers from all over the world achieve their goals by understanding what it actually takes to play their best golf. We're talking with leading instructors, researchers, and players themselves to find what is actually working. Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. It has literally been years since I've posted a new episode on here, but we're back. I don't know if we're back for good. We're back for a little series of interviews, which I think you
will find interesting. The World Scientific Congress of Golf just happened and I wanted to talk about some of the research that happened, some of what was there. I wasn't able to attend personally, so I reached out to some folks who presented and were there to share what they found most interesting and some things we should check out. So that's what we're going to hear. And today we're sitting down with Doctor Paul Wood.
He is the VP of engineering at Ping, as well as the president and chairman of the board of the golf science organization that kind of runs this Congress. So it was great to get his take on what happened, kind of some of the things that stuck out to him. And here are some research that he's involved with as well. That's what we're going to do today on this episode and we'll have more to come. So stay tuned to this podcast here for a bit. Make sure to subscribe if you haven't.
Who knows, maybe we'll we'll kick back off with some some interviews. I've got some ideas of series and stuff, but we will see if it happens. If you're not following us over on YouTube, we've been really active posting a bunch of great content, then doing some trips, talking with some interesting folks about some interesting ideas to play better golf. So make sure to go and check that out. Other than that, I'm excited to be back with this conversation. Hopefully you enjoy.
Let's get into it with Doctor Paul Wood. All right, excited to sit down with Doctor Paul Wood from PING. The World Scientific Congress of Golf was just a week ago. So he's going to break down some of the things that he thought were most interesting that he kind of remembers and stood out from, from the time there. Paul, you're, you're at the PING offices there now. You guys have a lab in England. What's going on? What do you guys have going on?
Over there, we're actually right here, probably a quarter mile from where the conference was held, we're at Loughborough University. This is just one of our little offices, but we have a joint lab with the university there. I mean, that's part of why Loughborough chose to hold the World Scientific Congress of golf is their big sports university, depending on how you measure it, the maybe the biggest small engineering team at a university anywhere in the
world. And we've had a pretty good relationship with them, I'd say for about 15 years with a lot of interns from their sports technology group funding PhDs and joint research. They have quite a lot of golf experts on staff and so that we kind of solidified that partnership a few years ago by having a lab here. And it's not exclusively with love for there's other universities around the UK that we work with and we do a lot of work. The golf industry in the UK is
thriving. There's a ton of golf nerds just like there are in America and Canada and elsewhere in the wild. So we, it's a small team. We have just six based here and the mothership still in Phoenix. But it's nice we we focus on more human performance, you know, kind of athlete performance, you know, where the the golfer meets the equipment and why humans get in the way around nice engineering and try to understand that better.
That's the main aim of the lab. Well, I'm sure we could do a few podcasts on that, but but we better stick to the topic before I I take us down any rabbit trails here. So the Congress, I guess. So if people don't know there's academics, there's yeah instructors as well, like coming up with ideas, doing a study and that everyone comes and kind of presents it and all talks about it together. Is that the gist of of what happened?
Exactly. You know, I come from academia and in academia conferences are, you know, ubiquitous. You, you host a conference, people present their latest work. Academics like argue about it. That's, you know, that's where everyone meets and and talks about the latest research. The idea of the World Golf Scientific Congress came from Alastair Cochran and Martin Farley in the late 80s. The very first one was 1990s. So we've been going for what's that a long time, 34 years?
Yeah, this was number 11. And the idea was to bring together academics and practitioners. So maybe a little different to the average conference where it's usually 99% academics. The idea of this one is there are academics presenting their work, but there are also coaches, practitioners, just people who are interested who swap ideas and we host some more practical workshops.
And so it's a it's a mixture of, you know, people from the equipment industry, people from academia who study golf coaches, people from the PGA, you know, we had workshops from a psychologist, a bio mechanics expert and the strength and conditioning coach, for example. Are you covering a lot of different things? But anything to do with sort of the science of golf that's in scope for this conference? Awesome. Well, let's get into the meat of it. I, I assume you attended a few
sessions. You're kind of like an attendee yourself, kind of like taking some of this in. What stood out to you? What was what were some of the things that you remember here a week after? Yeah. So there was a bunch. So it's three whole days. So there's some really interesting keynotes and maybe we'll, you know, we'll touch on a couple of those people that, you know, some of the people watching or listening might have heard of. But there's a few interesting themes.
And maybe a good one to start with would be there were a number of papers and presentations all on the topic of how parts roll on sloping surfaces, which was kind of interesting. So that probably was the biggest single area of the whole conference that a ton of people right now are doing research on. What happens when you're putting on a downhill slope, an uphill slope, the side of a side slope.
How does that change the physics of the role of a part, maybe the optimal conditions of the part, the optimal equipment for you? So that was interesting to me. You know, there's always something that's kind of a hot topic and I think this it was it to me, it makes a lot of sense because the technology to measure that stuff has come on in leaps and bounds in the last three or four years. So I don't think people suddenly magically started asking, hey, I wonder what happens to sloping
parts. It was now we have the ability to answer some questions. There's obviously plenty of outdoor potting greens with slopes that you can go out and use, but often a way to measure parts on the green. You know, you can maybe measure where it finishes with a tape measure, but to actually measure how's the ball slowing down, when's it skidding, when's it rolling? Those things require a bit more sophisticated kit.
And one example of that is the called the quintic overhead systems with the camera that sits overlooking the green, either an indoor sloping green or an outdoor sloping green. And it tracks the whole part and tells you what's the deceleration on the ball? When does it go from skidding to rolling? When there's a what we call the decay phase of the part, the last foot or two where the ball starts to like meander. Is it just those last few
wobbles? And you a lot of golfers have probably seen that right before it gets the whole, it just sort of seems to take a little dive one way or the other. That's called the decay phase. So that was fun for me watching a number of people coming at it from different angles, you know, from whether it's just pure physics modeling and then using the measurement tools to validate the model.
There was some dogs who built an app where you can, you know, you can program and I'll get them on a 2% download slot. Well, how should I adjust my speed? You know, what does that say? A 15 foot pot? What is that effectively now you know, 15 foot pot when you're downhill, a certain slot might be the equivalent of a 10 foot pot. And how do you fast track learning those skills? So as a goal for you don't have to do it all by trial and error. You can get some help to learn
it quickly. I thought that was like a pretty interesting part of the conference and to see and you know, ladies, I don't know how in depth into the science you want to go over. There's some interesting stuff. There's the, you know, you can calculate the coefficient of friction basically as the ball is slowing down, how fast is it slowing down or how you know how, how is that rate of
changing the speed? And you can calculate in a high school textbook that coefficient of friction is a constant. And you can you can teach a high school student how to solve those equations and go right by if I take your part and it has this speed to start with, you can plug in a cognition of restitution and calculate how far it would roll. Except in real life, that cognition of friction isn't constant and changes across the part.
And it actually can increase or decrease on a downhill part in interesting ways and grain on the green and how bubbly the green is and things like that can make a difference. So it's it's some quite youth physics to understand that. And it makes a difference to a golfer, right, Because two more inches of roll might be the difference between a two-part and a one part. So a couple of inches makes a difference on a part which is fun.
So I'm guessing the the skid and roll is very important to you guys as you're, you know, thinking about putter design. Is there anything that you didn't know going into it as far as like how it reacts with slopes that was that was surprising or outside of kind of what what you guys know? Yeah, I think that's what I think the big thing is that that coefficient of friction can actually increase during a part or decrease based on the specific conditions.
And that for Full disclosure, one of these papers presented was was one of our engineers. So we had one of the papers, but then there were a number of other papers of different aspects that we hadn't tested that in the whole kind of adds to our knowledge and at least corroborated the yeah, they were doing this test slightly different guys, but they saw some of the same things as we did.
I think it's part of what makes putting difficult to pin down because you would think based on just the physics and what's going on, you would think, well, I just, if I can just make the ball start rolling as quick as possible and minimize skid, that should be the best all the time because rolling is more consistent than skidding. But in real life, it doesn't
seem to quite play out that way. And we did some tests when you presented a different paper on giving players higher lofted butters and lower lofted Potters and seeing how they react to different slopes on the green. And it's not as simple as actually the Potter that gets the ball rolling the quickest goes in the hole better. Actually, there was some evidence that a bit more loft can help players adjust the
different slopes more easily. You basically don't have to adjust quite as much, but uphill to a downhill or so that was a good learning for us. I think as always, a research, there's more to learn and one test doesn't prove anything. So backing it up with more tests and I'm really understanding, OK, if we poke at this a number of different ways, do we still see the same effect? But. Why do you think more aloft is potentially better?
Yeah, I think so. In simplest terms, I think with more loft you don't have to make as big an adjustment to different conditions on the green. And to back up a little, at a previous World Scientific Congress trying to think 2016, so quite a while ago now, there was a paper presented on looking at consistency of role using a
pot of pendulum on flat greens. That kind of showed, if you squint a little bit, that getting the ball rolling quicker, at least in that condition led to more consistent roll out. You know, so if you, if you use a pendulum and you use a low lofted powder and get the ball rolling quicker, then the balls are collecting in a smaller area down near the hole. And so people took that to go, well, that must be better than right, Ball gets falling
quicker, more consistent. So we had a lot of our engineers, they're going to build 0° lofted powders. And actually none of them, I don't think kept it in play. And the feedback was well on the course. I get some weird results and it's quite hard to pin down exactly what we had results and what caused you. But the reality is players are pretty good and go, OK, it's not working. Maybe I don't know exactly why it's not working, but it's not working.
And then we go back to, you know, they would go back to using more loft. And I think this test we did, making players adapt to different slopes and we showed in those conditions where players are not getting into a group and in the same part, but they're adapting the different slopes, they actually had better distance control with a bit more loft and with a bit less. Interesting, was there anything I'm always curious on like setup and swing changes based on
slope? Is anybody doing any research on that of how how those things change? I didn't see anything at the conference on that, but I'm sure that people are looking at it and you know, interestingly, measuring setup can be notoriously tricky, right? And you know, you can, you can see it right. If you're a coach or you're a keen don't for, you know, you can, you can have a keen eye and go over that.
I can describe that setup. But actually then measuring where are the feet in relation to the ball and how have you aligned your body like that gets into reasonably complicated motion captures stuff. But I would bet that people are looking at that. It gets studied along the full swing, but maybe not as much in putting. Got it. Got it. OK. So we got due to technology improvements, we're able to look more at putting on slopes, skid roll, friction, all that kind of stuff is now getting more
measured, more documented. We're trying to figure out how to best navigate all those those things now. Yeah. Cool. What else? What else you got? What's? A good one. I think another one was quite of a very different, I guess, flavor, but an interesting There's quite a bit of stuff on women in golf. It is a fact that women in golf are strong minority, but it's also a fact that they're the biggest growing segment in golf. And there are a lot more women
coming into golf. And the percentage of golfers who are female is growing from a pretty low base. And the reality is there's not a ton of good research out there that studies female golfers and how are they different to male golfers? There's a lot of studies that, hey, we studied 20 players and one of them was a female, right? And you're not going to learn too much from studying one female. And so most studies tend to be
around male golfers. But there was a little section of a conference and then there's also a panel on specifically on women's golf. And what can golf do to better understand how women swing, what women need. You know, some of it was some of it was more the bio mechanics, some of it was the cultural side. And there's an interesting thing. I mean, I spent my life studying more the, you know, how people
interact with equipment. But there's a whole section of strength and conditioning and, you know, how would you tune strength and conditioning for female golfers, which is interesting and so right. But also some cultural stuff of a lot of female golfers are hesitant to do strength and conditioning. And we had some women on that panel kind of say, you know, yeah, that's that's the real thing. And often it's a fear of getting too bulked up, you know, that I'm not looking to get big
muscles. And the strength and conditioning coach was like, you know, I think people underestimate how much you've got, how much time you're going to spend in the gym to get to that point, right? It's there's a lot of people that would love to get bulked up and spend their life trying and don't get there.
But actually it puts people off going and doing any strength and conditioning because they're worried about I don't want, you know, I think at least from this panel for women in particular, that was a worry. That's culturally that's not, I don't, that's not a look I want to have.
But then they end up not getting the benefits of strength and conditioning for hey, look, you know, we can increase you want to be quite a bit here without bulky, without just by being more functionally strong in the right areas for golf. So that that whole panel I thought was really interesting. There's a number of research presentations. People are starting to do more female only studies, or at least studies where it's like an equal number of women and men.
And you start to look at how do women swimming differently? You know, women are not just small men. Like there are differences biologically, biomechanically in how they swing, but it's not super well, other than, hey, they're a little smaller, they don't weigh as much, they don't have as much muscle mass. So there's more than just that. So that's an area that I think is going to continue to keep
growing, but. Do you think we're going to see change in like structure of studies maybe going forward? Because like, thinking back, it's like either only men or like you said, there's like 22 ladies and, you know, in the study. So it's like, do you think we'll see studies put together differently, maybe here? Yeah, I'd like to think so. And there was there was an interesting debate in the conference about, you know, how do you, how do you set up research studies to be more
inclusive? What does that mean if you're, if you're doing a research study and you want to get 20 participants, like how do you choose those 20 people? And do you try to get something that represents kind of the bell curve of golfers? Do you try to actually get something that represents the full gamut of golfers?
Do you? We had an interesting comment and we had a panel on adaptive golf and one of the guys in on the panel said one thing I like about working with adaptive golfers is we're really solving for the edges, the edge cases, the people who are not in the middle of the bell curve, but on the periphery of the different possible ways to swing a Golf Club. And you learn a lot from the extreme cases, just like we learn a lot from working with PGA Tour players who are extreme cases, right?
99.999% of us do not swing like Big Dog or do not swing like Bryce in this chamber. But you learn a time for working with those players because they are the extreme side of how to swing a Golf Club. I think more and more studies are starting to realize you and you can learn a lot by deliberately picking people on the edges of the bell curves and adaptive golf. A very good case study of that. You work with say, a seated golfer. Well, they're not using their lower body at all.
In fact, their lower body is, you know, pinned down to the golf cart. And so it's a totally different mechanism. I've been studying the bio mechanic rule books kind of go out the window and which makes things pretty interesting. Yeah, No, it is super interesting. OK, next thing, you had mentioned in the little list ahead of time angle attack on wedge shots. What was interesting there?
Yeah, this is so you know, this, this was a ping study, but it was a it was a big one that I think had a lot of interest and and has a lot of particularly a lot of interest in the Gulf country world. It's a questions come up with time like how do people deliver like partial shots on wedges? Again, there's not as much research on it. It's actually very difficult to measure. You're talking about, you know, a much smaller motion than a
full swing. Anyway, Long story short, we we tuned our motion capture system to really focus on getting that moment of truth around impact captured as well as we possibly could. And particularly when does the club first brush the turf? Where is that in relation to the ball, whether you're catching ball and turf and you're catching turf and ball, if you are catching some turf, how much are you catching it and what does that do to you?
Angle of attack, You know, does the does the club just kind of plow on through like you would have or is it actually bending your angle of attack like the direction the club's coming in back up a little? And a good example of at least that idea would be Phil Mickelson's talked a little bit about using the ground and almost feeling like he's bouncing the club up into the ball when he wants to hit a
really high spinning one. And he wants to deliver a lot of loft to it and deliver it pretty neutral. When we measured 4000 wedge shots, it was a rain. We had people heading to targets at 15 yards, 30 yards, 60 yards. Didn't tell them how to do it. We just said that's the target. You know, there's a little bit of fairway, there's a green, there's nothing. It's a kind of vanilla chip. You'd play it the way you want to play it and just get the ball to stop as close to the pin as you can.
And across 4000 shots we measured over 1000 with a positive angle of attack where the club was actually moving up into the ball. So what the ball sees when the club gets to the ball, it's actually moving upwards, which really surprised us because a couple of years ago we were talking about is it possible to measure a positive angle attack
with a wedge? Like that's things are changing in this one or two inch period around the ball really fast without with this system that we devised, the focal system, we can measure that and suddenly now we have 1000 positive angle attack shots. And as you might expect, there's a real correlation between where you first kissed the ground and what that angle attack is at the ball.
So everybody is coming down into it and that first contact with the ground, the Cubs moving down, obviously it has to be moving down. But but then it was sort of roughly 30% of all shots involved the club then bouncing up into the ball in some way, which drastically changes what the physics the ball see. And it knocks a bunch of spin
off. And so you might have pretty similar technique where you're coming in kind of the same, but on one shot you hit the ground a little behind the ball and another you're right next to the ball and your angle attack can be 10° different pretty easily. Like that's not a particularly extreme case. We actually measured one where the Anglo attack had changed 25° from from about 10° down to 15°
up, and that was an extreme one. But it was a huge data set and it showed that actually there's this huge variety and how the club is getting to the ball, even though there's less variety and how the players are delivering it. And that exactly where you first kiss the ground is hugely important. And it was about 86% of shots that touched the ground before the ball. And just because you touched the ground before the ball doesn't make it a fat shot or a chunk. Like it could be a good shot
that you've clipped pretty well. You just brushed a little bit of grass. And actually, I think a lot of the best ones are sort of maybe first kiss with the ground as they can inch behind the ball. Even an inch and a half. Players describe that is still feeling pretty crisp. And then once you get more than about two inches by, that's when the player starts saying, I feel like I caught that heavy.
But now we can quantify that. We can really look at what did that do to a term we call spin off, like the loft. The ball is seeing the difference between the angle of clubs moving and the loft on the club. That's your spin off. You know if you're a little sloppy on where you catch the ground, you're changing your spin off by maybe 10° from shot to shot. That's a huge amount. You don't do that with your driver. You change your driver by 10°
shot to shot. You have one that's knee high and one that's way up in the sky. Obviously some people do that, myself included every now and again. But like that's a, that would be a huge difference on a driver. But on a wedge, it's quite normal. And I think it really explains why a lot of players find these partial wedge shots so frustrating. OK. I think I've got 100 questions about this, this study potentially, but narrowing it down, were these all tour pros
or these were all variety of? This was a variety of players. We do what we do, what we call our company wide test, which is kind of everyone who can swing a club and is not, you know, not too embarrassed to come and hit shots on our system. There were how many do we have? It was about 8 tall players that did the test and then probably about 20 scratch and better golfers. And then it's sort of a bell
curve. The average handicap and the whole test was about 8. And we did look at, you know, what do the scratch and better golfers do and what do the zero to 10 golfers do? What are the 10 above golfers do? And as you would totally imagine, the better the golfer, the more precise they are hitting the ground kind of right where they want to best spot. There's some variety of player to player to what clipping the
ball means to that player. So we're saying tour pros and and really good golfers, they do not clip the ball. There's some ground interaction. Some level of ground interaction and and that is changing the attack and it's basically bending the natural arc of the swing that the ground is actually having an impact. It's not necessarily making it go up into the ball, but it's maybe instead of being 10° down, it's 7° down because there's a little bit of tough interaction.
So how does this I'm affecting this like impacts bounce and that may maybe that's why you guys are kind of looking at this like how does that factor in then? Yeah. And so this was like this test was always kind of asked our standard sole, our main grind is kind of the bread and butter that fits most people. We've really started doing tests looking at, OK, great, let's have you play a low bounce wedge and a high bounce wedge and see
how that changes. We actually have the ability to take real grass and bring it into our lab. And so we get a bit messier, but we can look at how does natural turf compared artificial turf. And then I think everyone would have a feel for different types of conditions really change
things, right? So there's a big difference between clipping them off, you know, around the greens of Pinehouse where it's hard and it's really tight or Saint Andrews or True, versus somewhere where the ground is soft, maybe it's fluffy grass, but certainly, you know, when it's wet and the club just kind of digs right through. And those are very different conditions we need to
understand. But if we know exactly how you're delivering in the lab, we can then start to model what's happening and try to predict, OK Howard, this club for this player work in wet conditions out and work in Pinehurst like conditions. And I'd like to look at how to play as adapt, you know. So does the player adapt their technique or is it better just to give him a different wedge
and use the same technique? We know there's a bit of both goes on. We know that a lot of the better players will change their wedge for certain courses, but then there's obviously don't. They just know I want. I want to know exactly what I'm getting with the wedge, but I'll change my technique to suit the cause. So what's the take away then? Like what do we need to remember from from this study? For that one, I think you use the ground in some way. Use the ground.
It may be an emotive term. The ground is getting involved in what's going on almost all the time with partial wedge shots. It is changing what's happening in bank and the 86% shots have some level of ground interaction. 58% of the shots we measured were changing the angle of the tag by a meaningful amount. You know, enough to notice in terms of the spin you're
getting. And so I think when you're seeing results where maybe you know, you're not spinning in like you think you should be, the chances are that's a, the ground thing in terms of exactly where you're catching the ground. Unless a technique thing of you suddenly go super steep or you suddenly go super shallow, it's more likely to be you just made a very small change in where
you're impacting. And that's where sometimes we see like putting a different wedge in someone's hand can dramatically change their results, even though 99% of everything is the same or we change. There was a little piece on the sole of the club. It just helped helped or hinder your turf interaction. Very cool, very cool. What else do we have here? Performance on sloping lies or some studies around that?
Yeah, we've there's, again, there's some technology that's that's out there and is more readily available to researchers now where you can actually put a player on an artificial slope. But one way you know exactly what it is and you can manipulate it and then look at how they adapt to slopes. The company called Zen who make the partying platform that moves also make a swing stage that's starting to get out into the
into the world. That's basically a hitting that you can give yourself different sloping lines. And obviously you can do this out on a real course. You just it helps if you're a scientist, you want to control variables. It helps to know what the swap is rather than just sort of randomly pick out spots on a course. So the nice thing about these stages, as you can see, right, this is a 5° downward slope or
this is a 5° out of slope. One study that was presented showed kind of how players adapt to cycle lights when the boards below your feet or the boards above your feet, the better players will kind of go with the slope and then just sort of factor in, OK, I'm just going to aim a little left, I'm going to
aim a little right. And just, but actually in terms of their posture, they kind of go with the slope and just accept that I'm swinging, I'm moving my whole frame of reference on to this slope where the less experienced golfers tend to try to kind of more bring it back to a flat swing. But then of course, they end up in this sort of posture that relative to the slope is now in a spot that I used to and they
don't complete the task as well. So I think a learning is, you know, if you're on a line when it comes below your feet, just kind of go with that, go with the slot, just your aim accordingly and make your normal as much as you can make your normal swing relative to that's one. Useful, useful. So it kind of just affirms the thing that we that we've kind of assumed here over the years. Yeah, I think a lot of good golfers, most good golfers, work that out through trial and error.
Yes, let's see, you should do one. One more that you have on here that I'm interested in is face angle variability and irons. Yeah, that was a fun one. That was one of our workshops. Dr. Sasha McKenzie did a whole workshop on on that. He'd done some studies looking at players using smaller blades and larger blades on ions and trying to look at measuring workability. So the ability to delivery, it wasn't paid to look at the just the ability to control face angle.
And how do you, that's one of the things that's very important in golf, right? You know, distance is important, but like controlling the face to get the ball starting in the direction you need to is goes without saying, super key, super key and golf. So like, what is that? What can you do to minimize phase angle variability is a huge one. And Sasha did the whole workshop on that. It's kind of it's kind of
interesting. There's a good debate around and I'd say a very active debate right now and then golf coaching world around, Is it better to hit a particular shot shape right? Is it better to just go, I'm a dual player, I'm only going to hit drawers, never anything else? Or is it better to say, you know, when, when the whole dictates it, I'll hit a draw when the whole dictator fade or a straight ball? And I don't know that that's certainly not everyone agrees on
that. But one of the questions that Satchel was asked was, you know, is it easier? The players just naturally biomechanically find it easier to hit fades or drawers or whatever. And he made a pretty compelling bio mechanics argument as to why a drawn fade are no different bio mechanically. You know you can. You can be a drawer player and we can just close your eyes, you move the club in your grip, point you a different direction, make you make the exact same
swing, and now it's fading. Biomechanically, nothing changed at all. So biomechanically, there's no reason why a draw is easier than a fade or vice versa. And yet, you know certain clients, for whatever reason, find it just more comfortable in one than the other, and you try to make them hit something against their natural shot shape. You know how much of that is just that learned thing about this is what I'm used to seeing.
I'm so dialed in seeing this both like when I see a different both like it just kind of makes it harder for me to get the feedback. Any whatever it is, it just biomechanically there's no difference. But there's yet there's still this persistent thing that for some players it seems to work best to just pick your shot shape and go with it. And then for others they're very comfortable going No today. I mean, father example, Bob Watson would be the perfect example of that's not how he
operates. He does not pick a shot shape and go with it. He sees every shot differently. And the guys won two majors and a bunch of PGA Tour events. And so it clearly works for him. But there's still that question, is there a way that inherently is better for masses for most people? And that was, you know, Sasha, definitely beyond the camp of it doesn't matter by mechanics wise, whether it's a draw or fade, but still an open debate.
And that's what as a perfect example of where like, you know, there's the scientists coming out from one side. This culture is coming out from a different side of world. This is what I see on the course.
So help me explain it. And this is what I you know, what players feel they do is important because they're super dialed in. But then it's up to us as scientists to try to explain it. And sometimes it's a myth and sometimes it's the truth, and we just, you know, scientists catch it up. What was the most buzz this year in like what category was it Bio mechanics? Was it maybe throughout equipment? Because that might be where you live most of the time.
Yeah, it's a good question. I think there was certainly there was a decent amount of buzz around where's golf going in terms of, you know, the future of golf. We had one of our keynotes with Steve Auto from the RNA, which was great. You know, he got a lot of questions about world ranking, some good players. How where's that going? You know, which obviously is a big topic in the whole golfing world.
There's a lot of questions about reining in distance and and why and how and how much is this done deal and what where are we going next? And would you ever consider
changing clubs? And I think that's on a lot of people's mind, like the future of golf, whether you're coming at it from the sustainability side, and certainly here in Europe, I think that's a big conversation, whether you're coming at it from, you know, protecting the pro game and making that the best part of the when you're coming out from what's the best thing for 66 million people in play to grow
the industry. And as an equipment company, obviously that's something we care very deeply about. You know what we want golf to be a healthy sport that's popular. That's the those are the bread and butter of the game. So don't make a change purely for the pros if it's going to harm 66 million golfers. But all those voices and there's a lot of discussion around that. You know, we have another keynote from an equipment manufacturer that was, was
really cool. There was, I think, you know, just a quick, there was a little bit of talk about sustainability. It's because I don't think it's a huge thing in the golf industry right now, but it's coming just like it's coming in lots of other industries. So where's golf going to be in the future? I think was quite a quite a big topic.
Got it. Before we run any other studies, you're going to remember here as you as you go back, go back to work and start thinking about things, anything else you're going to kind of like maybe I should look into that more. Gosh, that's going to that makes you think. I don't know, I think I think that stood out to me.
Maybe not a study that was wrong, but there's a really nice tribute to Alastair Cochrane, who was the founder of golf science and kind of linking, I think one of the quotes was, you know, science injuries. And for people who don't know who he was, Alastair Cochrane was the godfather of golf science. He created The Search for the Perfect Swing, which is still the best book in golf science, even though it was published 5456 years ago.
He founded the World Scientific Congress and his vision was, you know, having a forum for for people to publish, you know, golf scientific work and talk about it and debate it. We had, you know, two different equipment manufacturers and a ruling body up on stage together, you know, laughing and enjoying it. Talking about Alastair Conkin and the effect he had on all of our careers, which was really
good. And I think it's it's an area where the golf science community can be quite a positive thing of science is science. And it doesn't really matter which company you work for and whether you agree with it or not. And Alistair was very good at that. Like do a study that probably answers the question and no one needs to run that study again because the science endures. And that was, for me like a real highlight of the conference to have that. Love it, love it. When's the next one?
This is every every two or four years. Yes, what goes, in fact it could be, I think we're aiming to try to have them every two to three years. We've been in the early days there every four years. The last couple I mean every two years, but obviously it's quite a lot that host a conference every two years. So there's a reasonable chance that we'd be looking at 2027. We're actually actively looking for the next host. There's a couple of different places that are interested.
You know, we'd like to, we like to take it around the world a little bit, but obviously a big part of the kind of population in the States and in Europe. And so potentially the next one will be looking at the states, although that's not a guarantee. And that's our goal is to have them regularly enough that people who are interested can see that we do video the whole thing and we're working on editing all those videos and we'll make those available for small purchase fee.
People want to look at just particular talks or if they want to get access to the whole lot. So that last year's conference or 2022's conference are up on our website rightnowgolfscience.org this morning and give us a couple of weeks and we'll have them all edited and ready to go. I'd recommend Saint Andrews the next location if I can put my vote in. Yeah. That's, that's fair. That's a good draw. We'll, we'll work on that. That was good.
That was the last one I went to and I would definitely come back if it was if it was there. But no, I'm excited to keep diving into this. Are you guys going to release the the book again of all the apps? Yeah. Actually, more recently, rather than publish a whole book, we we just put the abstracts that were submitted each, but each presentation is A2 page kind of summary. We'll put those on our website
once we have them. In the digital age, it's easier just to download and those will be available for free. But we do charge a little for the video. It's just to try to feed some funds back into running the conference because we also have a journal that we published. It's Open Access and there are some costs to running things. So that that keeps us, keeps us going for the next few years.
Well, thank you, Paul for the time letting us know some of what happened this year and I'll keep covering it. I'm going to dive into a lot of those studies. So we'll keep looking into all those. And I, we need to hear more on this wedge study. We might have you back to to go deep on deep on what you guys did there. I'd love to. It was a, you know, a 15 minute presentation did not cover the, you know, three months of work, the one into collecting the data. So there's a lot to be dived
into. There. Awesome. Thanks, Paul. Have a good day.