This morning the USGA and R&A released their long-awaited Distance Insights project, a joint effort by the two governing bodies of the sport to study distance and its past, present and future impacts on the game.

While the report contained plenty of valuable data regarding distance in golf, it stopped short of offering any concrete solutions to the distance problem. An interesting section of the report studied average driving distance of amateur golfers.

The data for male golfers was collected annually since 1996 at six different venues in the UK, usually between May and September. For female golfers, there were eight different venues visited annually since 2013, with one venue being visited annually since 2014. Time of year and competition constants were utilized where possible and the data collection was similar to the ShotLink system used by the PGA Tour.