This is definitely a niche topic, but I thought it was an interesting design decision.
I wrote a few months ago about how much I enjoy watching professional disc golf on Youtube. The channel I usually do that with is JomezPro.
One of the things that puzzle me a bit about their coverage is how they do scoring for the back 9 holes on a course. For both front and back 9, they show scoring for all 9 holes in the bottom-third graphic. For the front 9, the graphic begins empty, and then fills as they play through the front 9. However, for the back 9 it works differently – it shows the previous 8 holes, and then has one spot for the current hole. You can see an example of that in this video:
This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons:
- It seems like it would be more work to create the graphic; for each hole, you first need to move over the previous 8 hole graphics and remove the 9th, then you can add the scoring for this hole. If you used a blank 9 and then just filled them in, you wouldn’t need to move anything over.
- It carries over from the front 9 in the same round, but not to the next day’s round for multi-day tournaments. If it’s displaying recent performance, it kind of feels like the next day’s front 9 should have this video’s back 9 scoring carried over. That seems more consistent.
As a final note, I went back and watched some 2018 JomesPro videos, which used a different graphics set. For those, they didn’t use this back 9 display method – it started with a blank 9 and filled them in throughout the back 9, as I would expect.
So, I’m speculating as to why they would do the graphics this way, and I thought of a couple of possible reasons:
- It looks cooler than blank spots in the graphic.
- It better shows the state-of-mind of the player. If the player is on a hot streak, this will display it most effectively.
Maybe there are other reasons; maybe they will change it next season. Either way, it’s a cool set of graphics – well-built, high-production-value, smoothly-animated.
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