Where Caddie Apps Get Your Club Yardages, and Where They Lie

Stand on the 14th at your home club. 152 yards to a back pin, slight breeze off the left, front bunker you’ve been in twice this year. You open your rangefinder app, it says 152, and your brain says 8-iron because your 8-iron “goes 155.”

Except it doesn’t. Your 8-iron goes 155 about one swing in eight. The other seven swings it goes 138 to 150, and the app that told you 8-iron has never once seen those swings, because you never logged them, or because the number it’s using came from a range session where you hit eleven balls and remembered the good one.

That’s the whole problem with the golf club selection app category in 2026. The maths is fine. The physics engine is fine. The wind model in Arccos Caddie is genuinely clever. What’s broken is the input: nearly every one of these tools builds your yardage table from a distribution that’s skewed toward your best strikes, and then hands you a single number as though it were the truth.

The three places your numbers come from, ranked by how badly they lie

Range sessions on a launch monitor. Worst offender by a mile. If you own a Garmin R10, a Rapsodo MLM2PRO or a FlightScope Mevo, you have probably built a yardage chart from a bay session. Here’s what happens in that bay: you hit eight 7-irons, three of them are thin, you shrug and say “that one doesn’t count,” and you write down the average of the five you liked. You also hit them off a mat, which flatters contact, and often with a range ball if you’re outdoors, which does the opposite. The R10 in particular has a documented tendency to read low-spin, high-launch on thin strikes and still report a healthy carry number, because it’s radar-modelling ball flight rather than watching the whole thing.

Shot-tracking from on-course play. Much better, genuinely. Arccos, Shot Scope V5, Garmin Approach with the CT10 tags. These record every swing whether you liked it or not. But the aggregation is where it goes wrong, and it goes wrong in a specific direction.

Self-entered yardages. You typed them in. You typed in what you hit it that one day in July.

The averaging problem, with actual numbers

Shot Scope publishes that it uses your average carry, not your best. Good. Arccos uses what it calls “Smart Distance,” which is a weighted average designed to exclude mishits. Read that again: designed to exclude mishits.

Here is a real 7-iron distribution from a mid-handicap player, thirty-two tracked shots over a season:

7-iron, 32 shots, total distance to rest
Best:        168 yds
Top quartile: 158-168 (8 shots)
Median:       149
Bottom quartile: 121-140 (8 shots)
Worst:        121

Arccos "Smart Distance" output:  157
Simple mean of all 32:           146

Eleven yards. That’s a full club and a bit. And the eleven yards go in the direction that puts you in the front bunker, every time, because the smart-distance number is built by discarding exactly the shots that would have pulled it down.

Now, Arccos will defend this, and there’s a real argument: if you chunked it 40 yards, that shouldn’t count as your 7-iron distance. Fair. But the filter doesn’t distinguish between “duffed it 40 yards” and “caught it slightly thin, flew 141 instead of 152.” The second one isn’t a mishit. That’s a normal golf shot for a 14-handicap. It’s going to happen on maybe three of every ten iron shots you hit, and the app has quietly decided it doesn’t exist.

Shot Scope is better here because it’s more honest about showing you the spread, but the default club recommendation still leans on a central tendency that most players read as “what I hit.”

What the video-analysis tools add, and what they don’t

The audience for this piece films their swing. So: does putting AI on that footage fix the yardage problem?

Partly, and not in the way the marketing suggests.

Sportsbox AI 3DGolf, HackMotion (wrist sensor, not video, but same category of insight), and the newer Uneekor and Full Swing KIT vision systems are reading your motion, not your outcome. Sportsbox will tell you your early extension is 2.4 inches at impact and that your pelvis has shifted 3.1 inches toward the target. That is genuinely useful. It does not tell you your 7-iron goes 146.

What video does do, and this is the underrated bit, is explain why your distribution is so wide. If Sportsbox shows your low point moving four inches between your best and worst swings in a single session, you now know your yardage spread isn’t random noise. It’s a strike-quality problem with a named cause, and it means your effective yardage is the one you produce when your low point is behind the ball, which is most of the time.

Be careful with phone-only video tools, though. Apps that claim to derive ball speed or carry distance from a single phone camera at 60fps are doing something close to guessing. A ball leaving the face at 115mph covers about 2.8 inches per frame at 60fps in the plane of the camera. Even at 240fps on a recent iPhone, you get a handful of usable frames before the ball leaves the field of view, and any error in your assumed camera distance propagates straight into the speed estimate. Tools in this space vary wildly. Treat any carry number from a phone-video app as directional at best, and never as input to a yardage table.

The fix, in four steps you can do this week

One: rebuild your gapping from your bottom two-thirds, not your average.

Take your tracked data (Shot Scope and Arccos both let you export or at least view the shot list). For each club, sort the distances. Take the 33rd percentile, not the mean. That’s your “I can get there without a career shot” number.

A worked version for that same player:

Notice the difference shrinks as the club gets shorter. That’s not a coincidence: strike dispersion tightens with loft and shorter shafts. Your long irons are lying to you the most, which is exactly where the penalty for coming up short is usually harshest.

Two: stop logging range balls into anything.

If your launch monitor app syncs to a yardage table, turn that off. Range-ball carry is typically 5 to 12 yards short of a premium ball with a mid-iron, and mats add roughly 2 to 4 yards of flattered carry through reduced turf interaction. Those two errors are in opposite directions and they do not reliably cancel.

Three: take the club that makes the front of the green with a normal strike.

This is the practical payoff. For most greens you play, the front edge to the pin is 8 to 15 yards of usable landing area. If your 33rd-percentile 7-iron is 143 and the shot is 152, the answer is 6-iron, and the app saying 7 is wrong. This is the single largest scoring change available to a 14-handicap, and it costs nothing.

Four: practise the strike, not the distance.

Because the real goal isn’t to club up forever. It’s to narrow the spread so the app’s optimistic number and your honest number converge. Spray a line of foot spray on the sole, hit ten balls, and look at where the strike is. If eight of ten are low on the face and toward the heel, you’ve found the 12 yards. Sportsbox or any decent coach’s eye on your own footage will connect that pattern to what your body is doing.

Where this sits in the broader on-course decision problem

Yardage is one input. Wind, lie, elevation, pin position, and your own miss pattern are all in the model too, and some of the newer tools handle those genuinely well. If you want the fuller picture of how these systems make recommendations and where else the logic breaks, the AI caddies and on-course decisions pillar covers the rest of the stack.

One more thing about how you read the number

There’s a behavioural trap underneath all of this. When an app says “8-iron,” that reads as an instruction. It isn’t. It’s a point estimate with a standard deviation the app has chosen not to show you, wrapped in a confident sans-serif.

Shot Scope deserves credit for at least surfacing distributions in its performance dashboard. Arccos surfaces a strokes-gained view that will, if you dig, show you that your approach play from 150 to 175 is bleeding shots, without connecting that to the fact that its own recommendation engine is what put you there.

Your yardage table isn’t a spec sheet for your clubs. It’s a record of what you’ve done with them, including all the ones you’d rather forget. Build it from the full record and your club selection stops being a small daily act of optimism.