From Divots to Data
There was a time, of course, when some might have picked Stewart as a future Presidents Cup golfer—as he was in the Arnold Palmer Cup, the prestigious amateur event pitting top American collegians against international opponents. As a Vanderbilt senior, he was a first-team All-American, SEC Player of the Year and semifinalist for the Ben Hogan Award as the country’s top collegiate player. But his professional career stalled after a few years. A knee injury cost him club speed. The grinding lifestyle of pro golf’s lower rungs took its toll. He didn’t feel he was growing, just spinning his wheels to survive. Golf was a huge part of his life, but he wasn’t a romantic about chasing professional glory. True to his economics degree, his mind was more attuned to ideas like sunk-cost fallacy than Tin Cup narratives.
When he walked away from pro golf, he wasn’t looking to stay in the game. A clean break was fine. He utilized the connections made at Vanderbilt over the years to scout out a host of potential paths. He’d meet up with friends and acquaintances from a variety of fields over lunch and discuss insurance, consulting, banking, you name it. He thought about taking the LSAT and going to law school. Yet when it came down to it, he didn’t want to do any of it.
But he did have one idea, again informed by his time at Vanderbilt.
You might think a Vanderbilt student would have enough to read during the school year, especially a student juggling classes and coursework with, well, course work. But even with all those obligations, Stewart found time to read Mark Broadie’s Every Shot Counts. In the moment, the book changed how he thought about small things on the course—certain strategies and shot types. In the long run, it helped change his future.
Not unlike Bill James in baseball, Broadie was an entry point for Stewart and countless others in the golf community to a new way of thinking about the game and measuring success. The original book blurb describes it as using “analytics from the financial world to uncover the secrets of the game of golf.” Perhaps best known for strokes gained, an all-encompassing statistic from the same philosophical family tree as wins above replacement in baseball, the book became a totem of a data and analytics revolution.
Stewart isn’t a mathematician. He doesn’t claim to be a data scientist. But he’s always been intrigued by how things work, the patterns in the noise.
“I could show up in the math building at Vanderbilt and they could make me look very stupid,” Stewart said. “And that’s OK—they probably don’t understand golf. I don’t really shy away from not having a math background. I don’t think it’s a big deal. I think I’ve just gotten good at asking the right questions and then trying to actually solve the right problems.”
He also got to know Snedeker at Vanderbilt. When Stewart was tearing up the SEC, Snedeker was enjoying some of the best seasons of an ongoing professional career that has no shortage of them. In 2012, Snedeker won the FedEx Cup, the PGA Tour’s version of a postseason tournament that at the time carried a $10 million prize for the champion.
Snedeker was an early adapter when it came to analytics. He even hired his own stats guru, Mark Horton, at a time when many peers still relied on anecdotes and apocrypha. Always a willing mentor, he and Stewart played practice rounds together when their paths crossed after the younger golfer turned pro. Stewart met Horton during one such round. As eye-opening as Brodie’s work was, it was big-picture stuff, looking backward to evaluate what had already happened. He wasn’t walking a golf course with a player. He wasn’t offering strategic advice in real time. With Snedeker, Horton was doing just that. It was a revelation.
“I was young, and in hindsight, I wish I had talked to him way more,” Stewart said. “But truthfully, and I’ve said this to Mark, he’s one of the reasons that I do this. He used to be one of the only ones who would do analytics in golf.”
So, Stewart reasoned, maybe he didn’t need to find a profession. Maybe he could invent one. Not exactly a coach. Not solely a numbers cruncher. But something in the middle.
Stewart was the 2015 SEC Men's Golf Player of the Year (Vanderbilt Athletics).
Competing With Communication
Stewart initially reached out to a few friends, peers he had played with and against like Maverick McNealy and Robby Shelton. He pitched them on seeing if he could help them succeed in the fine margins that separate the world’s best. At first, that was mostly as a golf course strategist, helping them understand what the data said about how their particular patterns of play fit a course. Over the past seven years, as his portfolio expanded and he brought on a team of three computer engineers who work with the data and develop custom software, he’s expanded more and more into individual performance.
Stewart describes the work as peeling back the layers of an onion. The outer layer is what the data suggests a player can work on in his overall game. Then it’s what is important for a given tournament and course, then what’s important for a specific hole, right down to the real-time adjustments of how a course is playing—and what it means for the next day.
The data available has increased exponentially in little more than the length of some professional careers. In 2001, ShotLink began to track every shot on the PGA Tour, growing more sophisticated by the year. That fueled the rise of metrics like strokes gained that accounted for every conceivable variable. As Stewart says, is a player good on shots with the wind blowing from right to left and the pin on the left of the green? They know.
And knowing how to play to your strengths and shore up your weaknesses is everything.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all system,” Stewart said. “It’s more just where are strokes slipping through the cracks for you? What is low-hanging fruit? I love using that term. If you approach it from a consultant’s perspective, it’s how can we affect the most change while pulling the fewest levers?”
All you have to do is convince some of the most competitive, stubborn creatures of habit on the planet to try something new or think about things slightly differently.
In this regard, his previous life is an asset. His amateur record lends him credibility. He also knows what the world looks like through the eyes of his clients. But nothing matters more than communication, taking the information he has and conveying it convincingly.
It’s why, more often than not, when he sends information to one of his clients, the message doesn’t end with a graph or a chart or any sort of data visualization. It ends with words.
“I feel like I talk way more in coaching terms of trying to almost run scripted plays, if you will, using data,” Stewart said. “It’s not going to sound very data driven, even though it is. I think that’s the beauty of it. You just give them golf insights using words, but there is strong mathematical reasoning behind it.”
Along with reading Brodie’s book and connecting with Snedeker, playing for Limbaugh at Vanderbilt helped shape the life Stewart now lives. The coach arrived when Stewart was a sophomore. It was clear from the outset that the new guy was more of a motivator than many golf coaches, building success on technical precision but also a foundation of principles and standards applicable beyond the practice range. Along the way, Limbaugh didn’t take it easy on Stewart, even by the time the latter was the team’s best player. He was unfiltered and unsparingly honest. It made Stewart a better golfer—and communicator.
“You have to earn that, and he earned that with us,” Stewart said. “That’s a special thing when you can confront a player, out of deep respect and actual care for them, and help them be the best person and player they can be. That’s something that’s really stuck with me about Scott. Thankfully, I’ve had that with a couple of my guys over the years, and those are the relationships that you cherish.”
Competing on the Biggest Stage
Working with the U.S. teams competing in the Presidents and Ryder Cups always appealed to Stewart. Then word circulated in the golf world that those teams might be thinking about refreshing their data components, now all but mandatory in elite competition. A year ago, after Snedeker was named captain of the Presidents Cup team, Stewart reached out and said he would love to bounce some ideas off him. Snedeker told him to send them over. A few weeks went by, then the captain called and invited him on board. Earlier this year, Fuyrk, who is also an assistant captain on Snedeker’s team this fall, brought Stewart aboard in the same capacity for next year’s Ryder Cup.
As it is for golfers used to professional life as independent actors, the team setting for an event like the Presidents Cup is a change for Stewart. Instead of working with an individual golfer, he’s working for Snedeker in Medinah or Furyk in Ireland. He has to think holistically about the course and its particular implications across the roster and about how the pieces best fit together. A bugaboo for American teams in recent Ryder Cups, for instance, the alternate-shot format in early four-ball matches is frequently on his mind.
“Something I love about this opportunity is just the overall challenge of being around all the best players and helping to put them in spots to be successful,” Stewart said. “Just being a strategist, and kind of a little bit of a nerd, where else in golf would you be able to try to solve these problems? Golf is usually simpler than other sports—there is no passing the ball to another player. But an event like the Presidents Cup is one of the few instances where you have to factor all those things in. It’s a fun challenge.”
A challenge he prepared for at Vanderbilt, even if he didn’t know it at the time.
