Your New WHS Index

A friend of mine played there last week(Ballyliffin) and some bunkers were out of play. Would this be a reason why GP scores could not be submitted?

we could get all the way through the app till you had to pick a tee option and none came up.

thats when i asked about it in the pro shop

OK, there were some out of play on the Old Course alright

This kind of comment makes me think that you either don't understand the handicap system, or you're suspicious of everyone. I'm a high handicapper, i have decent length off the tee and am capable of getting a par or even a birdie on any given hole. What's far more likely is that I'll get a double or a scratch. I have scored 36 points exactly once, when i played the best golf of my life and got the only competition birdie I have ever scored. I was thrilled with myself. I have never played as well since. I didn't come within an ass's roar of the prizes and that didn't bother me. If my handicap on the day had matched my actual ability, I'd have had at least ten more points, but I'd have had miserable curmudgeons like yourself making snide comments everywhere.

If this was the old boards I’d just quote your last line or so, put a strike through the word ability and stick the word potential there in its place.

FYP 😀

I'd hazard a guess that 6 handicappers shoot level par more often than scratch golfers shooting 6 under. The gap is smaller, but you're talking about the same thing.

I'd also guess that the lower your handicap the more likely you are to shoot level to or slightly better than your handicap. And lots of competitions are won 36 to 39 points. The lower guys win their fair share.

But these are guesses. I could be wrong. As I keep saying, unless anyone actually puts forward some meaningful data we don't really know what we're talking about.

It's a massive statistical anomaly for a scratch golfer to suddenly shoot 6 under par. This is not the case with a 40-50 hc'er to shoot like 10+ better then their 50 hc. It's possible that simply a new club purchase or arriving at the course 15 minutes earlier than normal will provide all that's needed to improve on their previous scores by the required percentage.

I shot my joint best ever round a few weeks ago of 39pts on my home course. Sadly I would have still needed to find another 7 shots more somewhere out there in that round to actually win. Scoring for the weekend was normal. If my best round in 6-7 years is only good enough to get me within 6 shots of the lead when scoring is normal then there's something up. It was still an exceptional result for me and got me a 2nd best in class prize so I'm happy. Class prizes are the goal for me. If people ever actually get good at golf then there's no hope of winning. Short of redesigning the HC system, class prizes and generous gross prizes are the answer when the sport is one where the best player never wins.

🤣 ah here! If you want to beat your handicap by 10 shots or more try arriving 15 minutes earlier or buying a new club?! That's a good one!

I understand that the higher handicaps are more likely to have the really high scores. My brother in law had 39 points recently and won a comp playing off around 29. I believe he came up about 40 yards short of a par 3 green, took a cartoonish bounce and ended up a couple of feet from the hole for birdie. 5 points. If it had bounced into the bunker it could have been a scratch. A couple of shots can literally have a huge swing in the score for these guys.

But everyone understands that the higher handicaps are more likely to have the really big scores and that the lower guys in particular will struggle to compete on those days. I don't think I've seen anyone suggest otherwise. What people are questioning is how likely is it that they can win? And how much has that changed under the new system?

How's the handicap review going ? There was some mountain of information sent out by the GUI to assist last week fairplay to them

Have only started into it. There's a seminar next week, so will wait to see if there's more info from that.

Pretty straightforward from what I've looked at so far. Reports available in the portal are useful tools and on first looks, don't really have too much to do. Only anomaly I've seen so far is that there are flags for variations in index upwards and downwards and the number of these should indicate the need for an adjustment. But I've at least one member who has flags on both upward and downward movements in their index both of which cross the threshold for an adjustment.

Which is obviously contradictory. Effectively I should adjust them both upwards and downwards at the same time. 🤔

The thing is, there is scrutiny over this procedure. You have to make a return to Golf Ireland and the GI system itself flags players for review. So you need to have reasons for not taking any action and those would have to stack up.

The GI portal is a pretty big step over previous systems and it's now clear why GI wanted full control over handicap indexes and handicapping. They have usable data that by default highlights lots of areas of handicapping that previously weren't available.

These are the handicapping reports available to clubs and obviously also available to GI. They're pretty comprehensive:

The deleted score intents (DSI) report goes along with the unsatisfied score intents (USI) report. You usually get a USI if someone uses the GI app to enter a score and something goes wrong - there have been issues with location services etc. So that report highlights these for the h/cap sec so they can investigate and either complete the score entry process or delete it. Which then appears in the DSI report.

The handicap change report is also a useful one. All the reports can be exported to spreadsheet formats, so that's a useful feature too.

Sounds like someone who has the system well sussed.

The handicap report with the flags is a good one. The winner of our club singles matchplay is a single figure golfer and he has numerous upward revision flags on his record. If he hadn't won the matchplay, he would probably be getting a 2 shot increase.

He's a good honest golfer though. I'd have no reason to suspect anything untoward.

If you do get involved in the handicaps don't butcher the previous sec in your first year. Plug him for info for a year and then ream him the year after 😀

Just to add to the above that they sent out annual review forms and guidance to handicap secretaries last Friday. Forms have to be submitted by the end of November. As I think I mentioned earlier, there's also a webinar on this next week.