The Origin
I remember the early days of learning to play golf. I'd step up over a shot and have no idea where the ball was about to go.
I'd put the ball somewhere between my two feet. If I'd seen a YouTube video that week about playing it back in the stance, that's where it went. If I'd had a lesson from a Pro who told me to play it further forward, all the balls were further forward.
If you've ever stood over a ball and quietly wondered whether you had it in the right place, you know this feeling.
Then I learned how much ball position actually matters. And the more I learned, the more hesitant I got. Every shot meant stepping up over the ball and second-guessing myself. Did I have it in the right position for this club?
Surely someone had solved this?
Surely there was an easy way to learn the correct ball position?
Something's Missing
There was not.
There were a couple of training aids that tried to address ball position, but they were built on the antiquated 'one ball position' model — one fixed spot for every club, no adjustment for the golfer's height.
As a 6'2 golfer, there aren't many standard-size things that 'just work' for me. But this wasn't really about height. No one was treating setup as something you could measure, repeat, and trust. Every golfer was being left to guess.
I wanted a training tool that would let me practice the correct ball positions until I knew them in my body, so when I stepped onto the course, I wouldn't be standing over the ball wondering. I would just know.
The Approach
As a Research Engineer with patents to my name, I'm trained to look for the answer in the research. So I went looking.
What surprised me was how much already existed.
Peer-reviewed studies from the top golf research institutes show that moving the ball just one ball-width forward or back can change your dispersion by 22 feet with a 7-iron. The same research shows that even small ball-position drifts force the body into compensations - every shot quietly becoming a slightly different swing.
Then it got more interesting. Stance width matters too. It sets your low point. It sets your angle of attack into the ball. Which is why the pros adjust it deliberately through their bag - and why most amateur golfers, without ever knowing, lose strikes because their stance is the same width for a wedge as it is for their 5-iron.
The villain wasn't always a bad swing. It was setup inconsistency: stance width and ball position changing every time the golfer stands over the ball. And the data to fix it had been sitting in research papers and on Tour data sheets the whole time.
If a research engineer who knew where to look had to dig this hard to find clear answers, the average golfer had no chance. The information was out there. It just had never been put in their hands.
Taking Aim
I built it for myself first.
A training mat I could lay down at the range and practice the correct stance width and ball position for every club in my bag. Each design decision was an answer to something the existing tools had got wrong: sized to the golfer's height (six sizes, not one), customisable to the individual golfer, small enough to live in a golf bag, and packaged with simple drills you could actually use.
I called it Stance IQ.
The first time I took an early version to the range, the hesitation was gone. I stepped up over the ball, and I knew where it should be.
That's what it does for you, too. You step up. You're not wondering. Your stance is right for the club. The ball is in the right place. You take the shot.
From there, the rest follows. Strike improves because your angle of attack is right for each club. Dispersion tightens because your face and dynamic loft aren't drifting. Your swing feels more like itself because it isn't compensating for a setup that changes every time.
Early version of Stance IQ being tested →
The Long Game
Golf is hard enough, even when you have access to great coaches. For everyone else with limited time, limited access, learning the game between work and family - it's harder still.
That's the gap Divot Works exists to close. Not by replacing coaches. Not by promising shortcuts. By putting the same setup precision the pros use into the hands of the golfer who's trying to figure it out on their own.
Setup underpins everything. Once it's dialled in, you can stop second-guessing the foundation of every shot and move on to the next thing that's holding your game back, confident that when your setup starts to feel lost, Stance IQ is there to bring it back.
Our mission is to make golf easier to learn, so more people can enjoy this wonderful game.
If you've ever stood over a ball and wondered if you had it in the right place - Stance IQ was built for you.
𓂃🖊
Andrew Norman - Founder of Divot Works
