Hollett said he remembers discovering the GTRC by chance one day while on campus.
“I’m walking through the Keller Building and I keep seeing people carrying golf clubs around all the time,” he recalled. “Eventually, I just stopped somebody and said, ‘Where are you going with the golf clubs?’”
As it turned out, Hollett had stopped Eric Handley, the head of the center in the basement of the Keller building, who invited him down to see it.
Hollett visited the GTRC where, among other things, golfers hit balls into screens while being recorded by multiple cameras and sensors, which provide instant data on the golfer’s swing and ball flight. He said he was really drawn to what was being done and equated it to work in which he was already active.
“One thing I was really captivated by at that time, as I was in the beginning stages of studying learning and athletic settings and out-of-school spaces, was how learners use video to document and study their own practices,” Hollett said. “I had been studying skateboarders. So, I was just really interested in learners collecting data, in various forms, to learn together. In the GTRC they had multiple video cameras located throughout the space, weight distribution centers on the ground to basically track and analyze how golfers were moving and shifting as they struck the ball, and just about all the data broadly that they were able to collect.”
That sparked the idea for Hollett to begin looking into how instructors in non-traditional learning spaces — specifically in this case golf coaches teaching highly-skilled golfers how to become teaching professionals themselves — integrate data into the work they’re doing with learners. He brought on Turcotte, his doctoral student at the time, who had an interest in the intersection of sports and learning. Turcotte took on much of the data collection for his dissertation and later continued the work with a PGA Management program in Florida after taking on a position at Florida Gulf Coast University.
Turcotte found that coaches at both locations went about instructing their students and solving the same problems very similarly.
“They tend to look at very specific data points — how the club face hits the ball, the degree of the club coming down toward the ball, the ball flight path — there’s almost a subset of 10 to 20 data points that coaches tend to focus on, to break those data points into easily-digestible chunks where their players can make sense of them,” Turcotte said. “That’s where we find new coaches using their bodies, and more specifically using their bodies at varying scales to help their students interpret performance data.”