If you’re one of the more than 3.2 million golfers in this country who maintain a handicap, you know how easy the process is: You combine your shots, submit your scores, and the World Handicap System (WHS) tracks everything. . (Don’t have a disability? You can find us here).
You can do this on almost any round you play almost anywhere in the world, whether it’s 9 holes or 18 holes, or a certain number of holes in between.
You can even do it on par-3 and high fairways, which are very popular these days.
All of this has happened thanks to the WHS updates that came into effect earlier this year. Under the revisions, the system just doesn’t have a better way of handling shorter rounds (if you don’t get in all 18). It also has a new way of handling short courses; The length requirement for putting on the WHS has been greatly reduced, with courses as short as 750 yards and 1,500 yards on 18 holes brought into the barn. The result of these changes is that WHS is more accurate than ever, and reflects the way the game is played today.
This is good news for golfers. You should be happy. Scott Hovde is there, although it means a lot of work for him. Hovde is the USGA’s director of rating and handicap research, which means he’s in charge of – you guessed it – rating studies, a term that often causes confusion.
“When we say ‘measurements,’ most people think we’re talking about quality,” Hovde said. “We are not. We are talking about difficulties.”
Quality is subjective (the quality of courses is a matter of opinion). There is no difficulty. Difficulty can be measured. A tool for doing so is the Course Rating System, which provides two numbers, the Course Rating and the Slope Rating, both of which are listed on the scorecard.
What does he mean?
Simply put, the course rating tells you how difficult the course is for a golfer, while the slope rating measures the relative difficulty of that same course (compared to scratch golf) for a non-scratcher.
Arriving at these numbers involves a fair amount of math (not Einstein-level math, but more than most of us have done since high school) and long hours of careful observation. Hence the extra work Hovde faces these days.
Because courses must be rated before they become part of the WHS, one of Hovde’s pressing tasks is to have all short courses in the country rated (so far, about 300, or about half, have been rated; the break should be completed by the end of next year). He is not doing this alone. He is joined in the effort by about 1,200 course partners in local golf associations across the country. For months now, these experts have been following a rigorous process, inspecting all areas of the courses they visit, measuring hazard distances, the size and shape of the greens, the width of their habitats, and so on.
Hundreds of variables are taken into account for every hole, from the hardness of the soil to the strong wind, with obstacles divided into categories (bunkers, trees, water, rough, etc.) and given a level of difficulty on a scale of zero to 10. Scorers look not only at the difficulty of the hazard (such as, for example, the depth or depth of the bunker) but also where it sits in relation to the target on both the first and bogey golf swings.
In short, it’s the same way that heroic studies are measured, on a smaller scale. And the more you learn about it, the clearer it becomes.
Don’t take our word for it, though. Listen to Hovde.
Last month, we followed him and a team of pros as they scaled the 3-hole, par-3 course in Greenville, SC, and asked a lot of questions along the way. The result is a video (above) that explains the process of measuring the course.
Source link
