Handicaps, adjustments and DQ’s

[Tommy Briggs]

The purpose of identifying your lowest handicap over the last 12 months is it should represent the best golf you are capable of playing. It does not account for a new golfer who might be making a steady reduction in his handicap as he learns the game and his game improves. The old system made an assumption that the golfer had been playing for a while and using the 12 month formula worked well for the golfer who who has been paying. The new WHS is designed to have you play under your “best case” handicap. No longer are twenty scores used to arrive at a handicap, if you shoot an “exceptional” score your handicap is immediately reduced and regardless of how many scores you enter, the low number stays with you. If you practice like heck and shoot a career round at the WA, the career round is your new handicap and an adjustment is the best way to compensate for that new index. A DQ is warranted when the score is so low a reductions will not adequately compensate the field.

A golfer decides they are going to do whatever they can to win the WA. They buy the newest and best new clubs for their game. They take lesson after lesson after lesson, they spend the entire month before the WA at the range with a swing coach. The index they submitted to the WA was a 12.0. Those rounds used to calculate that 12 handicap were all played before that player took their month to work on their game. After they spent those 30 days before the WA at the range with a swing coach, had their 6 – 8 lessons they go out and shoot a 74 in their first round at the WA. Is that golfer a 2 handicap or are they still a 12? If you are that golfer the answer is easy, you are a 12, but if the field believes you gamed the system and you are a 2.

The WA did not invent any of these formulas, they are in the USGA Book of Rules, and the new WHS has similar in fact more severe rules to insure the golfer plays at their level today, not what they played at last month last week or even yesterday.

[Ron Zietak]

I’m with you Tommy.

[Author]

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