How to Find Your Lost Golf Ball

How to Find Your Lost Golf Ball, image: golf-monthly.co.uk

How to Find Your Lost Golf Ball, image: golf-monthly.co.uk

You put your shiny white golf ball on the tee and take a mighty swipe with your driver. The ball soars far and long, but a slight slice caused it to go into the high grass to the right of the fairway. When you reach the area where your ball should be, it’s nowhere to be found. Your aggravation at hitting a poor shot is compounded by a lost ball with your day’s enjoyment rapidly eroding. That scenario may now finally be in the past.

High-Visibility Golf Balls

These days, colored golf balls are more prominent in the market than ever before. Designed to stand out on the green and in the air, all major ball manufacturers have colored options available, even in their premium line of golf balls. While some brands simply have colored balls in their lineups, others have cut their teeth in this space. Volvik golf balls lead the pack in this market with its full line of  Vivid high-visibility golf balls in enough colors to fill a Crayola box. And some may say that they started the multi-color craze with the popularity of their translucent Crystal line of golf balls many years ago. Chromax golf balls are also a major player, using a transparent cover in a platoon of metallic and bright colors for customers to choose. Pair any of these eye-popping polychromatic orbs with a Martini golf tee and you may never lose anything on the course again.

Enhanced Visibility with Colored Golf Balls

Enhanced Visibility with Colored Golf Balls

Golf Ball Finders and Finder Glasses

Light-filtering sunglasses are a time-honored way to track your golf ball, both in flight and on the ground. The lens creates a crisp contrast between the background and the golf ball to aid in spotting in a sea of green. For those less interested in a pair of special sunglasses and can’t help but get your smartphone involved, the Golf Ball Locator App, will put a blue filter on your phone screen as you scan the ground to ferret out the hiding place of a white golf ball.

A Smart Golf Ball?

OnCore Golf, a company headquartered in the not-so-hotbed of golf in Buffalo, New York, broke into the consumer golf world with an unconventional hollow metal core ball. The OnCore landed with more of a ripple than a splash in the golf pond. As they say, nature abhors a vacuum, and that hollow space in the center of the golf ball grabbed the attention of tech wizards in the lab. What if you could put a microchip in a regulation golf ball that would be able to withstand the violent impact of a golf club swung at over 100 miles per hour and locate a golf ball to within one foot of accuracy? This being the 21st Century, the first thing OnCore did was launch an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to test the viability of the “Ball with a Brain.” To date, the project is 120% funded with $129,000 raised.

OnCore Golf Ball with Hollow Metal Core, image: golf.com

OnCore Golf Ball with Hollow Metal Core, image: golf.com

GPS Golf Balls and Systems

OnCore had a prototype of the Genius Ball ready within three months. The problem of eradicating lost balls with a GPS system may have been the first crusade, but the brain inside the ball is also capable of delivering information on spin rate (back, front, and side), initial velocity, degree of draw or fade, hang time, height apex, carry, and roll distance. It will be like taking your launch monitor onto the golf course. Golfers also will not have to pull their smartphone out of their bags after every shot to access all that good stuff, either. The Genius Ball will pair via a small device that can latch to a belt or a golf bag and connect via Bluetooth to display the data. If everyone in a foursome is playing a Genius ball, they can all be connected to the same smart device. The price for the Genius Ball is still to be determined. It could be in the $20-$25 range per ball, at least in the beginning. That is high enough that you might want to keep it in the bag on water holes, but there may come a day, maybe soon, when golfers will look back with nostalgia on all the golf they played with “dumb balls.”

Genius Golf Ball with GPS Tracking, image: refinedguy.com

Genius Golf Ball with GPS Tracking, image: refinedguy.com

As golf ball manufacturers continue to innovate with different colors and technologies, golfers should be able to find their golf balls more so than ever before. But instead of that, let’s try to keep it on the fairways and greens, okay?

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *