Handicap sync Your Handicap Index® says how well you score. AVA says why, and hands you the part of your game the number is hiding.
FREE FOR 14 DAYS · CARD REQUIRED · CANCEL ANY TIME
Data with direction
On the left is what your tracker already gives you. On the right is the same round after AVA reads it.
Work on this next
Nine of sixteen approaches finished off the green, averaging around fifty-five yards from the pin, and ten of the sixteen were played out of the rough. The 225+ yard band cost the most: practise that shot from a lie you did not choose.
Hole by hole
The nine holes of that first round, as AVA reads them. Swipe across. The number under each hole is what it cost you against scratch.
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The reload from 301 went out of bounds. Two strokes on one swing.
The costliest hole, and not the hybrid's fault. The chip out of bounds cost two.
Sand wedge from 34 yards, holed. Best shot of the round.
Two mistakes that cancelled: 31 yards right, then 54 feet.
The only green hit from the tee. Nothing gained, nothing spent.
Eight iron from 99 flew 149 and finished 50 past. Not the drive.
A 21-footer saved it — the best putt of the round.
Fairway, fairway, wedge, one putt. What the other eight could look like.
Three-putt from nine feet. Costly, and still not the first thing to practise.
Inside AVA Golf
Real charts from the app, built from the rounds your tracker already recorded.
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Personalized progression
Finding the leak is half of it. AVA matches what your rounds exposed to lessons from nationally ranked teaching professionals, and rebuilds the playlist as your game moves. No lesson fees, no drill library to search.
4 lessons · 31 min
Matched because you hit 2 of 7 fairways. Everything the approach numbers below cost you started here, on a lie you did not choose.
Matched because ten of your sixteen approaches were played from rough, and the 225+ yard band cost −2.7 on its own.
Two approaches this round flew roughly fifty yards past the distance you were playing to. Your watch measures total distance, ball to ball — this is the session that reconciles it with the card.
The drill that closes the loop: a structured block you can log, so next week AVA can tell you whether it worked.
Lessons are selected against the leak your own data exposed. You do not search a library and guess which video applies to you.
When the most expensive thing in your game stops being the most expensive thing, the playlist changes to whatever is.
Instruction from nationally ranked teachers is part of the $25 a month, not an upsell inside it.
Connect once
As a USGA Handicap Data Affiliate, AVA syncs your Handicap Index® and scoring history and keeps both inside your trends. Add a shot tracker or a launch monitor and the shot-level read above becomes yours too.
Connect GHINAVA reads your scores and never writes back. Nothing is posted to GHIN, no score is ever submitted on your behalf, and you can disconnect or delete everything whenever you want.
Authorise once. Your index and scoring history stay current on their own.
A tracker or a launch monitor gives AVA the shots behind the scores.
The two or three things worth your next bucket of balls, ranked by cost.
Free 14 days · Then $25/mo · One plan, every source included
GHIN + AVA GOLF
A 12 handicap can be a player who hits it everywhere and gets up and down from anywhere, or a player who is dead straight and three-putts twice a round. The index is identical. The practice plans are opposites.
This is the core limitation of a handicap: it is a summary statistic. It compresses eighteen holes and roughly seventy decisions into a single number, and compression by definition throws away the part that tells you what to do.
That is not a criticism of the system: the index does its job, which is fair competition, extremely well. It just was never designed to be a diagnosis, and using it as one is how golfers spend years practising the wrong thing.
Handicap Index® is calculated from the best eight of your last twenty score differentials. That means it responds to your good rounds and largely ignores your bad ones, which is exactly right for competition and misleading as a progress tracker.
The practical effect is familiar. You play well twice, your index drops, and nothing about your game has changed. Or you improve genuinely (better strike, fewer penalties) and the number sits still for a month because the eight rounds it is using have not rolled over yet.
AVA tracks the underlying measures instead: strokes gained by category, dispersion, gapping, strike quality. Those move when your game moves, which makes them a far better answer to 'am I getting better?' than the index, and the index then confirms it a few weeks later.
If GHIN is your only connected source, the next step is a shot tracker. Anything that records where the ball went (a Garmin watch, GolfPad, Shot Scope, 18Birdies) is enough to turn your scores into a strokes-gained breakdown by category.
If you own a launch monitor, connect that too. Session data sets your gapping and your strike baseline; your rounds decide which of those gaps actually costs you shots. The disagreement between the two is often the most useful finding in the whole profile.
With all three in (index, rounds, sessions) the questions get concrete. Not 'am I a 12?', but 'my approach play costs me four shots a round and the miss is the same shape every time, so I am playing to the wrong yardages.' That is something you can fix this weekend.
AVA Golf is a USGA Handicap Data Affiliate, so it is a native sync rather than an import. Authorise your USGA/GHIN account once and your Handicap Index® and scoring history stay current inside your trends on their own.
No. The connection is read-only. AVA never posts, edits or deletes anything in your handicap record, and you keep posting exactly as you do now.
No, and nothing else can either. GHIN holds scores, courses and your index, not shot locations or clubs. For the shot-level read you need a tracker or a launch monitor connected alongside it.
Context and truth. Your index and score differentials are the outcome measure everything else gets checked against, and course rating and slope are what make one 84 genuinely better than another. Useful, and not the half that tells you what to practise.
Because it uses the best eight of your last twenty differentials. Real improvement often shows in your strokes gained, dispersion and strike numbers weeks before the index catches up, which is exactly why AVA tracks those too.
The GHIN sync covers USGA/GHIN records. If your handicap is held by another authority, connect a tracker or a launch monitor for the analysis and keep your handicap where it is.
Yes, at any time, and you can export or delete everything AVA derived from your scores.
You do. Nothing is shared with a coach, a club or anyone else unless you send them a link.
14 days free · One price · Everything included
Free for 14 days, then $25 a month. One plan: no tiers, no add-ons, nothing to unlock later. Every source you connect is included.
Start for FreeWant the shot-level read too? Connect a Garmin alongside it.
