This week the PGA Tour is in “sunny” San Diego for the Buick Invitational. I have “sunny” in quotes because it’s actually raining 
Anyway, the Buick Invitational isn’t typically a huge tournament on tour and that goes double this year since Tiger is still rehabbing his knee.
For us here in San Diego though, it is a big deal. It’s the one time each year the PGA comes to town and plays on a course that I play on all the time. Torrey Pines is a public golf course and while getting on isn’t the easiest thing to do, it’s not impossible.
Following The Buick on Thursday and Friday can be a bit of a challenge though since I’m at work all day. Unfortunately, my work frowns upon me watching tv at my desk all day instead of clicking away at my mouse. Lucky for me, the PGA has thought about people like me and created “Shot Tracker“.
Shot Tracker is a flash application that runs from the pgatour.com website. There are a few different ways to interact with it. You can see the full leaderboard, individual groups on the course or your own “custom picks” of players that you choose.
Several views are available to watch
The full leaderboard view is pretty cool because it’s more than your standard list leaderboard. You can see where each player is and how they’re doing. They even have color and texture tiles for each shot so you can easily tell at a quick glance if the player is in the fairway, rough, bunker or green. It’s perfect for getting a quick check on the leaderboard as you switch between applications on your workstation.
Drill down player by player for all the in depth stats
The real awesomeness comes when viewing an individual player. You can drill down to each player and see their shot-by-shot round. You get key stats like how far the shot was, how far to the hole, as well as overall stats like Driving distance, driving accuracy, greens in regulation and a whole host of other stats. Every aspect of the game is detailed and displayed in several conveinant outputs.
I was able to keep up with the whole tournament throughout the day, and even got more than those watching on TV since the coverage didn’t begin until 3 hours in.
There were only a couple of negatives for me. The connection was interrupted a few times and gave me a “notice” that really didn’t tell me much as a user. A quick refresh of the page and I was up and running again. Oh, and even though it was a flash app, it remembered my view so I didn’t have to go clicking down to it after a refresh. The other odd part was that I couldn’t see the entire leaderboard when I loaded it up in FireFox, but it worked fine in IE. Not a huge deal, but it’s worth noting.
So if you’re stuck at work on a computer all day and want to keep track of your favorite PGA Tour players… fire up the Shot Tracker and enjoy! It’s the next best thing to being at the course instead of work 
