Sarah White can flat-out launch the ball. Her tee shots average around 300 yards in tournament play. The former Texas State University standout leads the Epson Tour in driving distance, and the rest of her game isn’t too bad either, as she continues her quest to make it onto the LPGA Tour.
But while White, a native of Grand Rapids, Mich., who started her collegiate career at Western Michigan before making her way to Texas, is long off the tee, it’s been the work she’s done on the rest of her game that is starting to pay dividends as of late. A big part of that recent journey has been with Shot Scope.
An official ambassador for Shot Scope, for the past two-plus years, she's been using the company’s X5 GPS watch to track every aspect of her game, which not only tells her where she might need to improve, but just as importantly, helps her lay out her strategy for how to attack a course or a tournament. Mechanically and physically, her swing is better than most, but she will tell you what we’ve all known for years.
“Golf is hard,” she says.
But…
“Shot Scope makes it easier.”
Shot Scope offers a wide range of award-winning products to help golfers enjoy the game more and lower their scores. Through its rangefinders, GPS watches, and other devices, Shot Scope can collect and interpret data to help golfers improve their scores in a short amount of time.
Using Shot Scope features like “My Strategy” has allowed White and her data analyst coach, Seth Gandara, to map out practice sessions and smart game plans based on data collected from more than two years of tournaments and rounds. Gandara is based in Dallas and partners with Shot Scope through a service he created called Method.Golf to help his players use this data to its full capacity to improve their scoring.
“The reason I love Shot Scope is that it's a lot smaller and doesn’t require any additional tech. None of my pros would ever agree to play with their cell phone on all the time,” says Gandara, a Yale graduate whose background includes venture capital and working in strategy and growth for companies like Apple and some AI startups before turning his talents and expertise to golf.
“And Sarah has been the most compliant pro that I’ve had,” he added.
It’s certainly helping her harness her talents in her drive to make it to the LPGA Tour.
To get an idea of White’s prolific power, her average driving distance according to Shot Scope is 291 yards. That’s just below what the men average on the PGA Tour, which is right around 300 yards. (White’s official average on the Epson Tour is a little more than 270 yards, but it only measures certain holes, not all drives. And on some of those tee shots, she’s not hitting the driver.)
Of course, we’ve all heard the adage, “Drive for show, putt for dough,” so it’s no surprise that White has been not only working hard on her putting, but that Shot Scope has revealed clues about her putting that she might not have otherwise known.
“Seeing strokes gained data by distance helped me zoom in on the exact lengths I need to work on. “It made my practice way more focused,” says White, who lives in San Antonio and once competed on the extreme mini golf competition “Holey Moley” five years ago on ABC Television.
The putting stats also revealed another important clue after she switched putters during a recent tournament.
“It showed me a clear difference (between the two) in strokes gained,” says White, whose older brother Brett is also a pro golfer. “And I decided to stick with the new one.”
This is just one example of how Shot Scope has helped her make informed decisions about course and equipment strategy. In another example, Shot Scope has helped her make the most of her driving prowess. For instance, it shows White her dispersion patterns over the last 10 rounds, and her miss tendencies. That, in turn, helps her decide when to go big to try to take advantage of her length and when to play it safe.
“It’s helped me use my length more strategically,” she says. ”I’ve been gaining over two strokes off the tee lately just by knowing when to choose driver vs. 6-wood – and being able to swing free without second-guessing.”
White, who has an Epson Tour victory to her credit when she won the then Symetra Tour’s Tribute at Longbow Golf Club in Arizona back in 2020, has been steadily climbing toward her ultimate dream of playing on the LPGA Tour. In May, she Monday qualified for her first LPGA event, the LPGA Mexico Open at Mayakoba, conducted at the difficult El Camaleon Course. She finished tied for second in the qualifier there, then won the second spot with a birdie on the first playoff hole. She narrowly missed the cut in the LPGA event and also made the field at the LPGA ShopRite Classic in Connecticut.
Her goal remains earning her way onto the LPGA Tour in 2026.
White had never played the course before, but she used the Shot Scope strategy map to navigate a most difficult layout in the qualifier. And she planned to do the same for the tournament.
“Honestly, it’s a huge part of course management for me now,” White says. “Nothing’s ever perfect in a round, but when I step into a shot knowing I’ve prepared with solid data, it’s way easier to commit and trust the swing.”
Of course, Shot Scope can help amateur golfers, too, both in terms of identifying weaknesses and strengths, and what strategies to use on the course. Once you collect enough data, Shot Scope can act as a caddie, recommending what clubs to use on a particular shot, basically laying out a plan for you on your best chances of success on each hole.
White’s advice to amateurs is to track everything.
“Every shot, every putt, even penalties,” she says. “The more accurate your data is, the more helpful it’ll be. And you will see more improvement faster.”