When I started building PARfect Performance, the vision was straightforward: give competitive golfers access to the kind of strokes gained analytics that Tour players and their caddies rely on every week. A tool that turns raw round data into something actionable.
What I did not fully anticipate was how quickly that vision would sharpen the moment I started talking to coaches.
What Coaches Actually Deal With
College golf coaches are stretched thin in ways that are easy to underestimate from the outside. At most programs, a single coach — or a coach and one assistant — is responsible for recruiting, tournament planning, practice design, player development, academic monitoring, and everything else that keeping a program running requires.
The time that coaches have to sit down, open a spreadsheet, and dig through individual player statistics is genuinely limited. And even when they find that time, the data they have access to is often incomplete — scorecards, maybe some basic fairway and GIR tracking. Not the granular, round-by-round strokes gained breakdown that would actually help them answer the questions they care about most.
Questions like: where is this player losing strokes in competition that they are not losing in practice? Which part of the game is actually holding them back right now? What should we be working on the week before this specific tournament?
Those questions deserve real answers. We built PARfect to provide them.
The Shift That Changed How We Build
Early on, we had a clear picture of what PARfect should do technically. Log rounds, calculate strokes gained, surface benchmarks. Clean and useful.
Then we started getting feedback from the programs using the app — the teams at the University of Delaware and Western Illinois University — and the picture got more specific. Coaches were not just looking for better data. They were looking for less time spent on data and more time spent with their players.
That distinction changed how we think about every feature we build.
It is not enough for PARfect to surface accurate strokes gained numbers. The information needs to be fast to access, easy to interpret, and directly connected to something a coach can act on — a practice conversation, a game plan adjustment, a recruiting evaluation. If a coach has to spend 20 minutes digging through the app to find what they need, we have not solved the problem. We have just moved it.
What That Looks Like in Practice
The most concrete example is Parfy, our AI assistant. The original concept for Parfy was player-facing — an AI that could answer a player’s questions about their own data after a round. That still matters. But the feedback we received from coaches pushed us to think about Parfy differently.
Coaches wanted a way to get a fast read on a player’s tendencies before a tournament without manually reviewing every round they had logged. They wanted to ask a question and get a useful answer in 30 seconds, not 30 minutes.
So Parfy became as much a coaching tool as a player tool. You can ask it things like: what has this player’s SG:Around-the-Green looked like over the last five rounds? Where are they losing the most strokes in competition right now? What changed between their last two events? Parfy reads across the logged data and gives you an actual answer — not a dashboard you have to interpret yourself.
That feature exists because coaches told us what they needed. Not what they thought would be cool. What would actually save them time and make their work more effective.
Feedback Is Not a Feature Request — It Is the Foundation
I want to be specific about what I mean when I say coach feedback drives development, because it is easy for that to sound like standard product language.
We are not collecting feature requests and adding them to a backlog. We are having ongoing conversations with coaches about the problems they are actually trying to solve — in their programs, with specific players, in specific situations. Those conversations shape the product more than anything else we do.
Some of what comes out of those conversations is immediately buildable. Some of it points us toward problems we had not thought about yet. Some of it confirms that what we already built is working the way it should. All of it is useful.
The short game shot chart we are currently building — a visual proximity map that shows where chips and pitches are landing across multiple rounds — came directly from a coach describing how they used to draw this by hand on printed scorecards. There is no reason that should still be a manual process in 2026.
The Goal Has Not Changed
PARfect exists to give coaches more time with their players, and to make that time more productive. More time means less time buried in spreadsheets and more time on the range, in the meeting room, in the recruiting conversation. More productive means showing up to those interactions with actual information rather than impressions.
Every feature we build is trying to serve that goal. And the clearest signal we have about whether we are succeeding is feedback from the coaches using the app.
If you are a college golf coach and you want to tell us what would make PARfect more useful for your program — or if you want to try it free for a full season — reach out at the link in bio or DM us at @parfectperformance. We are always listening.
Have a look at our previous post to get more insight into the world of golf statistics and PARfect Performance: Around the Greens: The Stats That Actually Predict Scrambling