Features

Why 150 yards is not always 150 yards

Wind, elevation, temperature, altitude and the lie you are standing in each move the number. ParPath shows you all five as separate yardages, adds them up, and hands you a club from your own bag rather than a generic one.

What the breakdown shows

Tap the yardage on the hole map and a sheet opens with three numbers across the top: the actual distance, the plays-like distance in large type, and a club. Below that sits one row per factor, and each row carries the raw reading and the yards it is worth.

So on a cold, uphill shot into a breeze you are not looking at "plays 168". You are looking at 150 actual, plus 6 for the wind, plus 7 for the rise, plus 4 for the temperature, and a wedge you were never going to hit far enough. The sign convention is the same everywhere: a positive number means the shot plays longer and you need more club.

The math runs on the server rather than on the phone, so every client gets the same number for the same shot, and it can be corrected in one place. The same breakdown is available for each half of a layup: drop a target on the map and the carry pill and the approach pill each open their own sheet, covered on GPS hole maps.

The five factors, one at a time

The five deltas are added to the actual distance to produce the plays-like number, with a floor at one yard so a downwind, downhill wedge cannot arrive at zero. The lie row is a menu rather than a readout: tap it, choose your lie, and the whole sheet recalculates, because the phone in your pocket has no way of knowing you are standing on the side of a hill.

Two of these are the ones people most often get backwards. Cold makes the shot play longer, not shorter, which is the opposite of what a shivering golfer expects, and it stacks with the fact that you are wearing three layers. Altitude makes it play shorter, and the effect is proportional, so it is worth more on a driver than on a wedge, which is why it is the first thing to recalibrate on a golf trip to the mountains. Both of those have a golf-side explanation worth reading: cold weather golf and golf at altitude.

Where the club recommendation comes from

The club shown in the top right is picked from your bag, not from a table of what a golfer your age should hit. It uses the carry distances you have entered for your clubs: your average carry where you have one, or the midpoint of your minimum and maximum where you do not.

The rule is deliberately simple. It picks the smallest club whose carry still reaches the plays-like number, which is the club that gets there rather than the club that might. If nothing in your bag reaches, it hands you your longest club, which is the app's way of saying this shot is not available and you should be thinking about a layup instead of a hero.

If your bag has no distances in it, no club appears at all, and every other part of the breakdown still works. That is the intended behavior: a guessed club is worse than no club. Getting real numbers into your bag is a range session with a launch monitor or a couple of rounds of honest note-taking, and golf club distances covers how to gather them without fooling yourself.

What happens when the data is missing

Wind and temperature come from a live weather lookup for your position. Altitude and the tee-to-green elevation change come from an elevation lookup. Both can fail: no signal in a valley, a rate limit, a slow response.

When one does, that factor shows a dash instead of a reading, contributes zero yards, and dims in the list. The sheet still opens and the other factors still count. You are told what is missing rather than silently given a number that quietly assumed the wind was calm.

Weather is cached for about fifteen minutes across roughly a kilometre, and elevation, being terrain, is cached and reused. So the wind reading on the 4th tee may be the same reading you got on the 2nd. That is a deliberate trade for speed, so the sheet opens instantly instead of hammering the weather service for every golfer on the course.

One place it is switched off entirely

Under Rule 4.3, a device that gauges elevation change or recommends a club is not permitted during a stipulated round, even where distance-only devices are allowed. So Competition Mode disables the whole plays-like system for that round: no adjustment on the yardages, no club recommendation, no breakdown sheet. You keep the raw GPS distance, and the number you see is the number on the ground.