This season the PGA Tour started tracking every ball hit on the driving range. Not during rounds — during practice. Launch monitors, cameras and time stamps, covering eight events from the Players Championship through the Travelers Championship, logging who hit what, when, how hard, and for how long.
Golf Digest's Luke Kerr-Dineen analyzed the full dataset: 256,064 shots from 228 players. The number that should change how you think about practice is not a swing speed or a carry distance. It is thirty-two seconds — the average time a tour professional waits between range balls.
Thirty-two seconds is not slow by the standards of a round. It is slow by the standards of a driving range, where most amateurs rip through a large bucket at a pace closer to ten seconds per ball. The fastest practicer in the dataset was Chris Gotterup, averaging one shot every eighteen seconds. The slowest was Aaron Rai, at sixty-six seconds. Rai won the PGA Championship this year. Gotterup is still looking for his first Tour title.
One data point does not make a thesis, and pace alone does not explain performance. But the shape of the dataset does. The players' two largest shot clusters were short-and-mid irons, covering 130 to 190 yards, and wedges, inside 130 yards. Together those accounted for more than 55 percent of every practice session. Drivers — the club amateurs reach for first and hit most — occupied a smaller share of the professionals' time than anything from 56 degrees to 7-iron.
The finding is consistent across events and across weeks. At the 2026 Masters, Golf.com reported that the average pre-round warm-up consisted of 43 balls. Forty-three. The average standalone practice session ran to 86.5 balls, with a median of 79. That is roughly half a large bucket at a public range — the amount most recreational golfers would call barely getting started.
Scottie Scheffler's data was the most striking in the set. His session-to-session pace varied by four seconds across three months. Whether he was preparing for the Players or the U.S. Open, his rhythm was nearly identical — the same deliberate cadence, the same wedge-heavy structure, the same number of balls within a narrow band. That is not a warm-up. That is a system, and its consistency is the point. Scheffler does not practice until he finds something. He practises the same way every time, and the data catches what anyone watching him would describe as a man who has eliminated randomness from the one part of the game he fully controls.
The post-round data was equally revealing. Golf Digest's U.S. Open coverage found that only 21 percent of players returned to the range after their round. Those who did hit an average of 25 balls in 16 minutes. Dylan Wu was the last player off the course on Friday at Shinnecock Hills and went to the range to hit four shots — all of them 268-yard 3-woods. He was not fixing something. He was ending on a feel.
The implication for amateurs is not that slower practice is automatically better practice, though the correlation is hard to ignore. It is that volume is not a proxy for quality, and never was. MyGolfSpy's instruction team identified the pattern from the other direction: golfers whose best swings feel like accidents are usually the ones who never pause between shots long enough to understand why one worked and another did not. Reflection is the mechanism. The thirty-two-second gap is not a rest — it is where the learning happens.
Most launch monitors will tell you what the ball did. A growing number will tell you what the club did. None of them will tell you that you have been hitting for forty-five minutes and your spin numbers started drifting twelve minutes ago because your grip pressure changed when your hands got tired. That pattern shows up in session data, but only if something is reading across sessions and flagging it — the kind of longitudinal tracking that turns a pile of numbers into a reason to stop, or to switch clubs, or to go home.
The PGA Tour built a 256,064-shot dataset to understand how the best players in the world use the range. The single clearest finding is that they use less of it than anyone expected, and they use it the same way every time. The amateur version of that insight is not to copy Scheffler's routine. It is to have one at all — and to measure whether you are following it.