I've talked about the USGA's new GS3 ball in past blog posts. As a recap, this "smart ball" pairs with my iPhone and measures several aspects of putting green quality after it rolls off the end of the stimpmeter. Speed is the obvious factor it measures. The other measurements it gathers are trueness (side to side movement of the ball as it rolls across the surface) and smoothness (up and down movement of the ball as it rolls across the surface). There is also a way to measure putting green firmness, which I will discuss in a future post.
Although we are still recovering (we are almost there) from a heavy aeration, the greens are getting better each day. You can see the metrics collected with the GS3 this morning. In this particular screenshot, the ball rolled 10' off the end of the stimpmeter, which is slower than I would like them at this point. However, we we forced to skip two days of maintenance because of last week's storm. The goal for the trueness number is to keep that value under 1 and the goal for the smoothness number is to that value under 5. While our trueness value is good, our smoothness value is at 5.77, which is indicative of spring aeration recovery. This is a great tool to quantify data that represents the maintenance practices that are being performed on the greens. As the season progresses, I will be posting more screenshots from this USGA ap.