Your records board is the shortest page in the app, and the one people ask about most. Why isn't the bomb you hit on the ninth hole up there? Why does one club have a Purest Strike row and the club beside it doesn't? Why did a record change on a day you weren't here? None of it is arbitrary.
The bar every record clears
Three things have to be true of a shot before it can hold anything.
The app has to be sure it was you. Every shot carries a confidence score for whose swing it was, and a record needs at least 0.85 — or a shot you claimed yourself, which stamps full confidence. Below that bar the shot is still real golf and still in your history; it just doesn't speak for you.
It has to be a swing, not a score. Records here are set on range and assessment shots only — so the 290 you crushed on the eighteenth in a GSPro round is not eligible for your Longest Drive. Round shots feed your scoring; range shots feed your swing. On the range you're measuring; in a round you're playing.
It has to be physically possible. That needs its own section.
The guard against numbers that never happened
A record with our name on it, built from a sensor glitch, is worse than no record. The code that computes your bests says why in one line: the golf community ridicules impossible numbers. So every candidate passes a plausibility gate. The real thresholds:
- Smash factor — ball speed divided by club speed — above 1.52. No golfer beats that; a monitor reporting it is reporting itself.
- Ball speed above club speed × 1.53 — a smash the launch monitor couldn't have produced in principle.
- Carry above ball speed × 4.5, plus 9.1 meters of slack: in the units you think in, roughly 2.2 yards of carry per mph of ball speed with about ten yards of headroom.
That last rule has a birthday. On July 16, 2026, this system produced a 365-yard drive off 116 mph of ball speed. One hundred sixteen miles an hour cannot carry 365 yards; the guard's ceiling for it is about 265. It was an extrapolation artifact: the monitor lost the spin read and modeled a flight from nothing. The bound catching it is deliberately generous, because sim courses at altitude genuinely do fly the ball. It rejects the impossible, not the improbable.
The guard also judges only what was measured: a shot with no club-speed reading can't fail the smash test, because an unmeasured relationship isn't a failed one.
Two you can claim. The rest you can read.
Two records here are yours to claim.
Longest Drive — driver, total. Where the ball finished: carry plus roll.
Longest Carry — any club, carry. Pure flight, whatever club produced it.
The pair splits on both axes on purpose, club and measure. It used to be two carry records, and for most golfers those resolved to the same swing — one of them was decorative. Now they can't collide: your Longest Drive might be a driver that ran out on a firm fairway, your Longest Carry a 3-wood you flushed.
Everything else — ball speed, club speed, apex, your best carry with each club — is a stat you can see, not a record you claim. Nothing came off the board when that was decided; what narrowed was the word claim, so the two that survive mean something.
Some records live per club, and one of them is rare
Purest Strike is kept per club and never once across the whole bag, because smash factor is club-relative: a driver tops out around 1.48–1.52, a mid iron 1.35–1.40, a wedge 1.10–1.25. Rank them together and a mediocre drive outranks the best wedge you'll ever hit. Each club gets its own row, judged against its own ceiling — the model wherever the physics demands it.
A club also needs at least 5 smash readings before it earns a row at all. Under that, the record would just be whichever swing happened to catch the middle.
That's also why club-speed and smash records are scarce. The bay cameras read your ball on their own every time; they read the club only when a reflective marker is on it. No marker, no club speed — and so no smash, not a low one, none at all. Our files come back missing club speed roughly 94% of the time, and GSPro-proxy shots carry no club data at all.
NEW means you topped something. FIRST means there was nothing to top.
NEW means the record shot landed on your most recent day here and a prior measured best existed for it to beat. You topped something.
FIRST means it landed on your most recent day and no prior measurement of that thing exists — your first apex reading, your first club-speed record. A genuine fact worth marking — but not a personal best: there was no personal to best yet.
The line exists because of a real bug: before the fix, a member's first session lit up ten gold NEW flags for topping precisely nothing. A celebration that fires on everything means nothing.
A record can change under you, but never quietly
On July 19, 2026, Longest Drive was redefined from a carry number to a total — the most member-perceptible metric change this program has made. For plenty of members the record shot itself changed: a different swing holds it now.
The rule around a change like that is short — records never change silently — so the board carries this note, in these words:
> Records update: Longest Drive now measures total distance — carry + roll, where the ball finished — with your driver, so the record shot may differ from your old carry-based number. Longest Carry is unchanged (flight only, any club). Your previous carry-based drive record is preserved below as Longest Driver Carry.
Your old number wasn't deleted, relabeled, or re-badged into something you didn't earn. It sits on the board as Longest Driver Carry, marked retired — it never flags NEW and never chases a ladder. It's a receipt: it happened, it stays.
Rounds have a bar of their own
Everything above is about shot records. Round records — your best score — run on the oldest rule in golf: play it as it lies.
A round sets a record only if it's clean, and clean is binary: zero retakes. Not few, not hardly any: one do-over and it's a round you played, not a round that stands. A conceded tap-in is a different animal; it counts as a stroke on your card, so it changes nothing.
Is one mulligan really the same as forty? Yes, and you already agree — every golfer alive knows 71 with one mulligan is not 71. Honesty is binary even when the golf isn't. Nobody's being scolded: your history keeps every round exactly as you played it. The clean test decides only what can set a record.
And one piece of housekeeping you deserve to know: some older scores here were added up wrong. Until we rebuild one from the round's raw record, it can't stand as official — and the correction only ever gives strokes back, never takes them.
Why the board is short
One trust bar, one plausibility gate, two claims, per-club where the physics demands it, honest flags, loud changes, clean rounds. Every number on your board cleared all of it — which is why there aren't more, and why the ones there are worth saying out loud.
From the glossary
Related reading: The World Isn't Clean, and Neither Is the App · Clean Data In, Clean Numbers Out · Why Your Count Looks Low (And Why That's the Honest Answer)
Golf Balls: What You Should Actually Play
You can spend $600 on a new driver and gain four yards. Or you can spend $35 on the right dozen golf balls and change how every single shot behaves — off the tee, into the green, and on those little pitches that decide whether you make bogey or double. The ball is the only piece of equipment you use on literally every stroke, and it's the cheapest thing in your bag to get right. Most golfers never think about it. Here's what's actually going on inside that little sphere, and what you should really be playing.
Take this into the bag and bay