The Hack That Solved Slow Play at One of America’s Top Golf Courses

As the head golf pro at Erin Hills, Jim Lombardo has spent years dreaming up new ways to speed up the pace of play at the world-class course.

His staff even uses GPS devices to monitor the exact location of each group on the course to identify any stragglers who might slow things down.

But lately, Lombardo and his team have discovered a new way to get a bunch of everyday hackers through 18 holes in a hurry—and it has nothing to do with a fancy piece of technology. Instead, it boils down to one simple question.

How far do you hit your 7-iron? 

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The Wisconsin course, which this week hosts the Women’s Open, was one of the first in the country to implement what has become known as the 7-iron Solution. 

On the walls of the starter’s shack and inside the caddie barn there’s a chart on display that advises players which sets of tees to use based on how far they typically hit that one club. Since Lombardo first put up the chart in 2023, Erin Hills has seen a 26% uptick in people using the shorter, white tees. And the overall speed of play has picked up accordingly.

Plodding play is a scourge of the game at all levels. In the upper echelons, the PGA Tour has taken steps to limit the amount of time top pros spend standing over their balls before playing a shot. But the problem is more acute for regular folks who carve time out of their busy schedules to sneak in a round, only to find the local course is so backed up that they’re waiting at every tee box. 

Which is exactly the issue that David Pierce set about solving. The answer, he came to realize, wasn’t about making people play faster. It was making them play shorter. 

The idea for the 7-iron Solution came from a joint paper published in 2020 by the U.S. Golf Association and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. The headline item from the “Distance Insights Report” was that the growing power of pro golfers was threatening to undermine the game. 

But what caught the attention of Pierce, then the USGA’s director of research, was the less-publicized conclusion that recreational players take too long because they play from tees that are too far away.

Many courses, including Erin Hills, had tried to advise golfers on which tees to play from based on how far they hit their driver. Pierce, who himself plays a few times a week, knew exactly why that was a dubious metric: People tend to embellish how far they can hit a driver. 

“The driver is the most exaggerated club in the bag,” Pierce says. “They tell you how they hit their best drives—not their average drives.” 

That’s less true when it comes to a 7-iron. Another issue was that old advice recommended the same playing distance regardless of course. In reality, though, the 6,000 yard tees away at one course might be nothing like the tees 6,000 yards back somewhere else. 

Pierce’s system, by contrast, is custom fit for each course. It looks at every hole from every tee in order to determine the optimal distance for every player, a calculation that’s helped by a survey the USGA conducted of 65,000 golfers to better understand their games. 

The idea isn’t to make everyone play such short distances that they feel like they’re at a pitch-and-putt. Rather, it’s to turn a course into a fair challenge that forces players to use a diverse set of clubs without being unnecessarily difficult. 

Once Lombardo heard about the method, Erin Hills became one of the pilot courses, and they quickly noticed a change in behavior. In 2022, 24.2% of players teed off from the whites. Last year, that was up to 30.6%.

The upshot: fewer golfers had to be chased down for gumming up the course. 

“It whittles down the number of groups that might be a challenge for pace of play,” Lombardo says. 

That aligns with feedback Pierce has received. He has found about 1 in 10 players are willing to take the advice, which is a decent chunk considering around half are already playing the correct tees. It’s also true that getting through 18 holes isn’t the only thing golfers are slow at. 

“Golfers,” Pierce says, “are slow to change.” 

Pierce plays his home course in Pennsylvania at about 6,300 yards, which is just right because he says his 7-iron goes about 145. But he’s just like other golfers, too. Even he admits he might be exaggerating by a yard or two. 

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com