Reply To: Handicap Validation is Open

[Harry (The Hack) Radley]

I have no complaints the way the WA does the handicapping system. A lot of my comments is in jest and should not be taken seriously. It is fair across-the-board to everyone and they do a great job. My pet peave is with the way they enter handicaps at at my home state. The WHS has a provision to alter the rating for difficulty of the course but nowhere is that hardly ever used. For example every Monday we all have a tournament of 200 plus players on the best country clubs in the state. Because they don’t want 200 players chopping up their members tees they moved them forward to the senior tees making the course a lot easier. But then the scores are entered as though we have played the members tee making it a lot harder and skewing your handicap incorrectly. If you play only these tournaments they say it doesn’t affect you but your handicap will drop point .8 across-the-board. That is well and good if you are only play there but if you come to the WAM that .8 for 4 days could mean 5 to 6 strokes differene. When questioned the handicap manager just stated that it would be too hard to adjust 200 individual scores. A perfect example of this was last year we played a tournament with where the tee markers were moved extremely extremely extremely forward I had a 3 under round and end up running 8th over the field there was 37 even par rounds and out of the 214 players there was 173 that played to their handicap. This is not possible on a normal day. I suppose what I’m trying to get across is if the WHS has a set of rules and guidelines why is it that no one follows them to the letter of the law and use the excuse oh it is too hard to adjust every individual card. It isn’t that your job as a handicap manager to do it correctly.