I am just writing to update you all on the Course Rating Project that is an essential requirement for the introduction of the new World Handicapping System (WHS) that is being introduced in 2020. As a reminder, the WHS requires that all courses are rated in a consistent basis (the Slope Rating) to enables peoples’ handicaps to be consistent with the difficulty of the course they are playing wherever that is.
Next Monday (May 13th), the Hampshire Golf Course Rating Team will be at South Winchester to do the ratings for our courses. There will be between 10 and 20 of the Team on the course throughout the day, one of them being our own Alan Bailey – Thanks, Alan! An hour’s worth of tees have been allocated to them (930-1030) and we are hoping that they will get round the course in four hours (like we have to!) but if there is a small delay later on in the day, I hope you will be understanding. I understand that watching them is not a particularly interesting ‘spectator sport’ but I’m sure they will be happy to try to answer any questions you may have.
To ensure that we get full value from their visit, the General Committee relooked at our courses and have made two changes to it. Firstly, they have introduced new ‘forward’ tees which will be available for both men and ladies. You will see these are currently marked on the course by green posts. These tees will be designated as ‘orange’ when introduced. Secondly the current red tees will become available for use by men as well as ladies – these will be designated as ‘green’ tees.
So the Hampshire Golf Course Rating team will be rating seven courses in total, 5 Mens courses and 2 Ladies courses. We hope to get new Standard Scratch Scores (SSS) for the 7 courses from them over the summer (some of them may be the same, of course) and the Slope Ratings in good time for the introduction of the new WHS.
Clearly there is a lot of work for the Course Rating Project Group (Jos Kerr, Alan Bailey, Vince Wood, Steve Gibbs, Richard Adams and myself) to do planning the implementation of these changes to the course (and perhaps SSSs) including scorecard and course guide redesign, the look of the tees, etc and it is currently intended that all the changes will take effect from Monday September 30th 2019.
If you have any questions on this work, please speak to any member of the Project Group. Best wishes for your summer’s golf, Malcolm.
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