Change in our course ratings.

Perhaps someone can explain to me why our course ratings would change. Our state association, the MGA, sent a team to our club to reevaluate our golf course. Our golf course was built in 1958 by Geoffrey Cornish. It has five sets of tees and can be played from the red tees at 5,875 yards all the back to the black tees (the tips) at 7,029 yards. Through the years the trees have grown and the fairways have narrowed some. The course has not become easier, but equipment has improved. We have a championship layout that used to be home to an LPGA event (1995-1998). The MGA visits our course for evaluation every five years or so. It's rare that any changes are made to our ratings. This year, our ratings dropped dramatically. For example, our blue tee rating went from 134/73.1 to 127/72.1. All other tees have seen a similar reduction. I'd love to discuss this with the evaluators, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. Perhaps there's some knowledgeable folks on GolfWRX who could offer some insight.

The course is required to be re-rated at least once every 10 years, or when there's a significant change to the course.

Without knowing what the course looked like when the old rating was done vs the new rating, we would only be guessing. Tree removal, green surface, ob.

Here's a rating's primer:

https://www.usga.org/handicapping-articles/course-rating-primer-e5bf725f.html

I'm wondering, did they change any OB to penalty areas, which is now allowed in the 2019 ROG? That could certainly change the ratings.

My best guess is that when the club changed ownership and opened to the public, they changed maintenance practices to make the course more playable - lower rough and slower greens - and also took some trees out in the trend du jour. All of these would have the effect of lowering scratch and bogey ratings.

I've never understood why these rating are so secret. I think it would be very interesting to see the details supporting ratings but I think they are secret.

If you are really interested, here's a link to the 2015 version of the rating manual.

https://forum.Not allowed because of spam.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=72612

> @Roadking2003 said:

> I've never understood why these rating are so secret. I think it would be very interesting to see the details supporting ratings but I think they are secret.

I don’t think it’s secret...it’s just not that interesting to 99.999% of the world. I’m sure if you asked your State Association for the ratings detail / calculation for a given course, they’d give it to you.

so the yardage didn't change at all? because a rater told me yardage is the most important factor in ratings. worth noting, that for every 55 yards added, the slope will increase 1 point and the course rating 3/10th of a point. a prior poster's point about lower rough and slower avg green speeds when it went public (if this is what happened) makes sense. more of a stretch would be that the additional trees have cut down on avg wind speeds at the club, which in turn the raters feel make the course easier (i don't buy that, but sure). another thought, have the narrowed fairways created fairway bunkers that are deeper into the rough than in the fairway, meaning the ball is less likely to bounce into them? b/c that would then explain a reduction in cr/slope, b/c the rough is deemed easier to play from then a fairway bunker.

Rating system is horrible anyway. In general I find it skews to overrating long, wide open courses and underrating shorter tight courses. Way easier to score on a 7200 yard resort course that is wide open than one that is 6700 with hazards and ob on both sides of every fairway. You can have 4-5 shot differences in handicap solely due to course you play and it's actual difficulty relative to its rating.

> @pinhigh27 said:

> Rating system is horrible anyway. In general I find it skews to overrating long, wide open courses and underrating shorter tight courses. Way easier to score on a 7200 yard resort course that is wide open than one that is 6700 with hazards and ob on both sides of every fairway. You can have 4-5 shot differences in handicap solely due to course you play and it's actual difficulty relative to its rating.

I tend to agree that one of the primary flaws of the rating system is that they define the landing zone for a "scratch" golfer as an average of 250 yards from the tee. The reality of the modern game is that most of the best golfers are hitting it consistently longer than that, which leaves a shorter second shot, and that throws off all the math. I think if they rebuilt the calculations around a 275 yard "average" drive for a scratch golfer, it would better reflect the current reality.

Time for me to give my course rating rant.

IMHO there is too much subjectivity in the current system. Now that we have a crazy amount of Shotlink data and the overwhelming majority of courses are GPS mapped t would be a relatively straight forward exercise to have a computer "play" each course and generate a statistical stroke average based on shot distribution. That becomes the course rating and one or two standard deviations away becomes the slope.

> @jvincent said:

> Time for me to give my course rating rant.

>

> IMHO there is too much subjectivity in the current system. Now that we have a crazy amount of Shotlink data and the overwhelming majority of courses are GPS mapped t would be a relatively straight forward exercise to have a computer "play" each course and generate a statistical stroke average based on shot distribution. That becomes the course rating and one or two standard deviations away becomes the slope.

In practice, that's not far off from what the USGA rating system actually does.

You're still going to need somebody to go out and give a subjective assessment of how difficult the rough is, how deep a bunker is, how fast the greens are, etc. which would be an inputs to your Shotlink model. I doubt you'd end up with a material difference from the current system.

"Rating system is horrible anyway. In general I find it skews to overrating long, wide open courses and underrating shorter tight courses. Way easier to score on a 7200 yard resort course that is wide open than one that is 6700 with hazards and ob on both sides of every fairway. You can have 4-5 shot differences in handicap solely due to course you play and it's actual difficulty relative to its rating."

- i've long thought this, and got into some debates over on gca about it where there was some pushback. however, i'm with you in that course rating's put too much of a premium on length with how golf has changed in the last 20 years. the driver went from being 1 of the most difficult clubs to hit to 1 of the easiest, especially for better players. ball goes longer & straighter now w/ less spin b/c of the club/ball combos and i dont think course rating's and slopes have taken this into account enough. additionally, i'm not sure other aspects of the game are any easier now than they were 20+ years ago (putting, bunker play, chipping / pitching).

> @jvincent said:

> If you are really interested, here's a link to the 2015 version of the rating manual.

>

> https://forum.****.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=72612

>

I'm looking for the details for my courses. I'm somewhat familiar with the process.

> @raynorfan1 said:

> > @Roadking2003 said:

> > I've never understood why these rating are so secret. I think it would be very interesting to see the details supporting ratings but I think they are secret.

>

> I don’t think it’s secret...it’s just not that interesting to 99.999% of the world. I’m sure if you asked your State Association for the ratings detail / calculation for a given course, they’d give it to you.

I'll try that.

> @raynorfan1 said:

> > @jvincent said:

> > Time for me to give my course rating rant.

> >

> > IMHO there is too much subjectivity in the current system. Now that we have a crazy amount of Shotlink data and the overwhelming majority of courses are GPS mapped t would be a relatively straight forward exercise to have a computer "play" each course and generate a statistical stroke average based on shot distribution. That becomes the course rating and one or two standard deviations away becomes the slope.

>

> In practice, that's not far off from what the USGA rating system actually does.

>

> You're still going to need somebody to go out and give a subjective assessment of how difficult the rough is, how deep a bunker is, how fast the greens are, etc. which would be an inputs to your Shotlink model. I doubt you'd end up with a material difference from the current system.

Arguably it's what the manual system is supposed to do, but once you add subjectivity, you get an endless debate. If the computer does it, the debate is limited.

There is still an issue of rough height to consider. A course map and the shotlink stats would need to account for a difference between 2" rough and foot high fescue as an example. And I don't know if they have shotlink stats for hitting out of forest.

> @raynorfan1 said:

> > @pinhigh27 said:

> > Rating system is horrible anyway. In general I find it skews to overrating long, wide open courses and underrating shorter tight courses. Way easier to score on a 7200 yard resort course that is wide open than one that is 6700 with hazards and ob on both sides of every fairway. You can have 4-5 shot differences in handicap solely due to course you play and it's actual difficulty relative to its rating.

>

> I tend to agree that one of the primary flaws of the rating system is that they define the landing zone for a "scratch" golfer as an average of 250 yards from the tee. The reality of the modern game is that most of the best golfers are hitting it consistently longer than that, which leaves a shorter second shot, and that throws off all the math. I think if they rebuilt the calculations around a 275 yard "average" drive for a scratch golfer, it would better reflect the current reality.

So you believe most courses are overrated? They should be rated as easier than they are? I wonder how that would relate to the bogey rating and slope. Personally I do not see most lower cap golfers hitting it 25 yards further on average.

This source says under 5 cappers average 250.93, so I would guess that zero cappers would average 270 or more.

https://www.golfmagic.com/golf-news/average-driving-distance-age-and-handicap

And then you have to decide what to average. Do you throw out mishits?

> @Roadking2003 said:

> > @jvincent said:

> > If you are really interested, here's a link to the 2015 version of the rating manual.

> >

> > https://forum.****.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=72612

> >

> I'm looking for the details for my courses. I'm somewhat familiar with the process.

>

Ah, misunderstood.

I agree, there's no reason to keep the data shrouded in secrecy.

> @Roadking2003 said:

> This source says under 5 cappers average 250.93, so I would guess that zero cappers would average 270 or more.

>

> https://www.golfmagic.com/golf-news/average-driving-distance-age-and-handicap

>

> And then you have to decide what to average. Do you throw out mishits?

i wonder if this game golf survey captured only when players hit driver for said study. b/c it says driving distance, aka length off tee on par 4s and 5s, not Driver distance.

> @Shilgy said:

> > @raynorfan1 said:

> > > @pinhigh27 said:

> > > Rating system is horrible anyway. In general I find it skews to overrating long, wide open courses and underrating shorter tight courses. Way easier to score on a 7200 yard resort course that is wide open than one that is 6700 with hazards and ob on both sides of every fairway. You can have 4-5 shot differences in handicap solely due to course you play and it's actual difficulty relative to its rating.

> >

> > I tend to agree that one of the primary flaws of the rating system is that they define the landing zone for a "scratch" golfer as an average of 250 yards from the tee. The reality of the modern game is that most of the best golfers are hitting it consistently longer than that, which leaves a shorter second shot, and that throws off all the math. I think if they rebuilt the calculations around a 275 yard "average" drive for a scratch golfer, it would better reflect the current reality.

>

> So you believe most courses are overrated? They should be rated as easier than they are? I wonder how that would relate to the bogey rating and slope. Personally I do not see most lower cap golfers hitting it 25 yards further on average.

Not necessarily. I believe that scratch ratings on big, long, wide open courses are probably too high (these courses are "over rated"). In my experience, scratch golfers can put the ball out there ~275+ if there is no impediment to doing so. Short, tight courses probably don't suffer from the same problem, or may even be under rated, as dispersion has likely increased with distance.

Bogey ratings feel pretty OK to me. The bogey golfer tee shot distance of 200 yards feels consistent with what I see on the golf course.

The result is that rating would go down and slope would go up in many cases.

A few years ago my club closed for 6 months to reseed the fairways with a new grass, remove some trees and make some minor fairway modificaitons. It is a tight, "old school/east coast" track, ~6500 yards, par 70 from the tips.

We did have an onsite team come out to look at the course after we opened - actually the USGA teams were there a lot. But as part of the re-rating process we had to submit hole by hole scores for a few months. I cant remember how long we did this but they needed hundreds and hundreds of hole by hole scores from each different tee boxes. They then used this as part of the process for re-rating the holes/course in addition to the onsite team evaluations. We did have some holes that changed their rating in the end but honestly, I never compard scorecards to see how the overall rating moved much or if it did. Never really bothered me I guess.

tldr - the change in rating could be do to any number of things. Tree removal, changes to green complexes, changes to fairways etc.

> @dcmidnight said:

> A few years ago my club closed for 6 months to reseed the fairways with a new grass, remove some trees and make some minor fairway modificaitons. It is a tight, "old school/east coast" track, ~6500 yards, par 70 from the tips.

>

> We did have an onsite team come out to look at the course after we opened - actually the USGA teams were there a lot. But as part of the re-rating process we had to submit hole by hole scores for a few months. I cant remember how long we did this but they needed hundreds and hundreds of hole by hole scores from each different tee boxes. They then used this as part of the process for re-rating the holes/course in addition to the onsite team evaluations. We did have some holes that changed their rating in the end but honestly, I never compard scorecards to see how the overall rating moved much or if it did. Never really bothered me I guess.

This was probably not the scratch / bogey rating, but your handicap committee assigning handicap ratings to the holes.

> @Roadking2003 said:

> This source says under 5 cappers average 250.93, so I would guess that zero cappers would average 270 or more.

>

> https://www.golfmagic.com/golf-news/average-driving-distance-age-and-handicap

>

> And then you have to decide what to average. Do you throw out mishits?

If a golfer averages 250, the "landing zone" would be more like 230-235.

> @Shilgy said:

> > @raynorfan1 said:

> > > @pinhigh27 said:

> > > Rating system is horrible anyway. In general I find it skews to overrating long, wide open courses and underrating shorter tight courses. Way easier to score on a 7200 yard resort course that is wide open than one that is 6700 with hazards and ob on both sides of every fairway. You can have 4-5 shot differences in handicap solely due to course you play and it's actual difficulty relative to its rating.

> >

> > I tend to agree that one of the primary flaws of the rating system is that they define the landing zone for a "scratch" golfer as an average of 250 yards from the tee. The reality of the modern game is that most of the best golfers are hitting it consistently longer than that, which leaves a shorter second shot, and that throws off all the math. I think if they rebuilt the calculations around a 275 yard "average" drive for a scratch golfer, it would better reflect the current reality.

>

> So you believe most courses are overrated? They should be rated as easier than they are? I wonder how that would relate to the bogey rating and slope. Personally I do not see most lower cap golfers hitting it 25 yards further on average.

I think the tendency is underrating short tight courses and overrating long ones.

If you put gun to my head and say shoot par or die, I'm picking wide open resort course over tight 6700 course every time.

First, I was referring to the comment that "most lower cap golfers average 275" and hope that would change ratings. The lower caps might average 275 on their best strikes but I see very few 0-5 caps that really average 275.

Second, I believe the ratings at most courses have become better at rating difficulty. My old club in Minnesota, par 71, is rated at 70.3 133 from just 6121 yards. Current club in Arizona is par 72 rated at 71.4 127 from 6601. Basically 500 yards longer and rated just a stroke more difficult and lower slope.

That said, I agree with you on your "shoot par or die" scenario.