Understanding Rankings via GPS

A Global Position System (GPS) can pinpoint your exact location on earth, down to the foot, by measuring the distance between you and each satellite, then feeding that information into an algorithm that triangulates your position. As long as you have a connection through your GPS device, you can know exactly where you are located at any moment in time.

If you had to guess how many satellites are needed to give you an accurate location, what would you guess?

Surprising to some, a GPS only needs 4 satellites to provide your precise location on earth. That’s it!

The TUGR ranking system is similar to how a GPS works. By taking a head-to-head, Relative Strokes, approach, every junior golfer has akin to what are hundreds of satellites, or in their case, competitors played, to pinpoint a ranking relative to their peers.

We visually show these connections via the “scatter plot” that is found in the Overview page of every ranked golfer. Each dot represents a competitor played - above the line means the specific player beat the competitor and below the line means the specific player lost to the competitor. See the example below:

The TUGR optimizer analyzes the countless number of primary and secondary connections to pinpoint a player’s precise location in the junior golf ecosystem. We can have confidence in a player’s ranking location because we can show that that player, by and large, beats other juniors who are ranked worse than them, and loses to other juniors who are ranked better than them. It’s almost that simple!

Akin to a GPS that only needs 4 satellites for accuracy, every player within TUGR has hundreds of “satellites” pinpointing an exact location, or ranking.

Rankings are updated for this week: http://tugr.org

As always, reach out with any questions,

Jeff