By Kelly Neely and Gretchen Yoder, OGA Handicapping & Course Rating
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Gretchen and I often laugh (when we aren’t crying) about the weird and wonderful world of handicapping and course rating we inhabit. We muse upon the fact that we are in unusual company with like-minded oddballs who know quite a bit about some peculiar subjects.

Not that golf in and of itself is strange; rather due to its complexity, there are mystifying things surrounding it (we’re lookin’ at you, Rules Officials).

Gretchen pointed out one day that there are actually more professional mermaids in the U.S. than there are handicapping and course rating administrators. Apparently, there are over a thousand people willing to reach whatever accreditation is necessary to become the best mermaids they can be. In comparison, folks of our ilk only number about 200 so while that makes us more rare, they have better outfits.

Speaking of oddities, we happen to be fascinated by the quirkier aspects of the Course Rating System and while some of them are not necessarily things Gretchen and her ready team of raters encounter on a daily basis, we believe they deserve closer examination. As well, I decided that since last month it was my brain that was being picked, it needed a month off to recover so it’s now Gretchen’s turn to become the pick-ee.

First, a quick tutorial because one is always needed with Course Rating:

• Yardage measurements for the course have to be spot-on. The USGA requires that the equipment we use be within 6 in. for every 250 yards.
• Ten obstacles are evaluated per hole – landing zones, topography (stance & lie), fairways, crossings, lateral (water, extreme rough, OB), bunkers, rough & recoverability, green target (length of approach shot & size of green), green surface (speed & contour), and psychological (Yep. This one is deserving of its own article)
• Scratch Player – Course Handicap of a big fat 0 for men and women. Note: Even though most of the course rating team are not Scratch golfers, we do need to think like one!
• Bogey Player – Course Handicap of 20 for men, 24 for women
• Every hole on every set of tees at every course is rated for each of those players. This gives us a Scratch / Course Rating and a Bogey Rating and guess what those two things produce? The magical Slope Rating. We need all three for an official rating for handicap purposes.
• We always rate the forward tees for the Scratch player, even though they may never play from there. Read above bullet point again.
   

By the way, when I asked Gretchen which one of these five quirks of course rating were the quirkiest, she slyly demurred.

Quirk Number 1: Doglegs 

Doglegs are quite high on the quirky list! A golfer thinks of a dogleg hole differently than a Course Rater does. We don’t rate it with thought of bending the ball around a corner.

For course rating purposes we have to factor in a straight shot to the center of the fairway, and it cannot include rough even if it is easy to hit out of. We must do this full well knowing that some golfers will try to literally cut corners on doglegs. Hole 9 at Club Green Meadows comes to mind where single digit golfers on the back tee might actually play into a different hole rather than laying up due to the dogleg.

Each different hole has to be looked at individually for each golfer, and every tee. We might have Bogey laying up a second shot on a back tee and Scratch laying up on their drive from a middle tee. It all depends on the severity of the dogleg. If it is a slow, curving hole, we might not have to lay up the golfer at all. There may be a way to adjust the fairway width to make up for a section of the fairway where the golfer can’t make it due to trees or water blocking the edge.

Hole 13 at Tokatee is a pretty severe dogleg, with tall, gnarly trees protecting the entire right side of the hole. From the White tees, if the Scratch male golfer hits his prescribed 250 yard drive (indicated by red line), he would go through the fairway, through the rough and into the penalty area. For Course Rating, we have to hit a straight shot –no draw, fade or slice – and the landing zone must be in the fairway. In this case, he would have to lay up about 75 yards in order to stay in the fairway, which virtually lengthens the hole, and makes the Scratch hit a longer shot to the green.

Would that affect the Course Rating? Absolutely. If we think about two almost identical golf holes, but one is 75 yards longer, that would affect the Course Rating. In this case, the Course Rating would go up. The Bogey golfer would also lay up, but only about 25 yards, so the Bogey Rating would also go up a bit. And the Slope Rating would adjust between the two.

The fun (if you are slightly twisted to think that way!) thing about doglegs is that they can also reduce the effective playing length of a hole as well. If we traded the trees on 13 for a pond cutting into that corner, the scratch golfer (indicated by the blue line) could go right over the fictional water and reach the middle of the fairway. He’d be able to shave off about 30 yards for his approach shot to the green.

When the Course Rating team of trained volunteers looks at any hole from the teeing area, and we cannot see the fairway landing zone, we are already thinking about whether there may need to be a dogleg adjustment.

Quirk Number 2: Split Fairways  

About two out of the 35 courses we rate each year contains a split fairway, so it isn’t particularly common, but they can be radically different so are treated as such. Hole 9 at Stone Creek is one good example. We don’t even rate the right side of the fairway because it’s typically only played (on purpose) during the winter when it’s “cart path only.” Though the golfer would have an option to play that wider fairway landing zone with easier topography, it would technically lengthen the hole. But in doing so you could avoid a slew of bunkers on the other side so you’d have that going for you.

Conversely, Hole 2 at Tetherow has a split fairway where the right side is flat and the left side has a severe hill. So, in comparing the two examples, golfers will use the left fairway at Stone Creek most often vs. Tetherow where the Bogey golfer will use the right flat side and the Scratch would take the left.

Do split fairways cause the rating to go up? It depends. Two 20-yard wide fairways might rate higher than one 40-yard wide fairway. Here’s where my ice-cube theory comes in. If each obstacle is thought of as an ice-cube and you drop it into a glass of water, will it cause the glass to overflow? The overflow is a metaphor for the rating going up. Think of the 40-yard fairway as one ice cube, and the two 20-yard split fairways as an entire scoop of ice-cubes.

Quirk Number 3: No Landing Zone

When I started grilling Gretchen about this quirk, she focused on the Bogey player falling under the heading in the Course Rating Manual (no you can’t look this up yourself, as this manual is super-duper Top Secret) of “Player Cannot Complete the Hole” (insert sad face here). And no, this has nothing to do with suffering a loss in match play and stomping off No 17 green. This typically occurs when the Bogey has been challenged to play a tee beyond his ability – you know, when your mind writes a check that your body can’t cash. From a lengthy tee location, the Bogey player cannot hit the ball far enough to reach the fairway due to inability to carry over bodies of water, extreme rough, desert, or other junk too numerous to name here.

An example of a hole with no reachable fairway for Bogey is Tetherow Hole 4 from the back tee. As we are strong believers in playing the tee you will enjoy the most for your handicap level, it’s worth pointing out that maybe he shouldn’t be playing from those tees in the first place.

Where this wouldn’t apply would be say, on Hole 5 at Crooked River. The Scratch could choose to hit the crazy shot over the canyon, while the Bogey has an actual fairway to hit to, which is a far more prudent decision.

Quirk Number 4: Double Green vs. “Conjoined” Greens  

For this quirk, you get two for the price of one. 1) What I call “conjoined” greens. Yes, this is my own label – you can’t blame the USGA. These are greens that are connected such as holes 9 and 18 at OGA or holes 1, 8 and 17 at The Reserve North Course –OR – 2) A single hole that has two different possible holes to play to, like Pronghorn’s Fazio Course hole 17 or Bandon’s Pacific Dunes hole 10.

Let’s talk about the conjoined greens first. For Course Rating, we need to figure out where one green ends and the other begins. The team might go as far as looking for old hole placements in order to see how far we need to measure. In the case of 1/8/17 at the North Course, hole 1 is pretty well defined from the other two. Finding where the definition is between 8 and 17 greens took some time to work out.

A golf course or tournament committee might want to put some sort of marking to indicate where the definition is between two, or more, greens. Refer to Rules of Golf, 13.1/f, Relief Must Be Taken from Wrong Green. Wrong Green is defined as “Any green on the course other than the putting green for the hole the player is playing.” That is about as deep as I will delve into the dark world of the Rules of Golf. For further questions, I would defer to OGA’s Rules Gurus, Pete Scholz and Terry McEvilly (authors of our Rule of the Month feature).

For the situation where there is a single hole with 2 greens, we start by asking the course which green is used the most. If one is used more than the other, we would defer to that green’s information. If they are used 50/50, we might have to go as far as taking the average for both greens and entering that info into the Course Rating program.

And then there is the very unique hole 5 at Bandon Crossings…..not only is it two different greens, but one is a par 4 and the other a par 5. We have official ratings for both which results in three sets of ratings: White and Upper White for 18 hole play, and North White for the 9 hole loop.

Quirk Number 5: Par 3s With Tees at Different Angles  

Normally tees are lined up in a fairly straight line, so they present the same obstacles, the same view, the same trouble! But when the tees are at various angles to the green, we need to look at the obstacles individually per the affected tee.

A great example is hole 6 at Brasada. The silver tees (yellow line) are at 105 yards, and the red tee (the most forward set indicated by the red line) is at 110. Wait, what?? There was a method to the madness. The red tee was built so players would not have to carry the monster bunker and the larger swath of desert that is in line with the other tees. It also has a more playable area if the player is short of the green. The Bogey says Thank you, Brasada.

If we were looking at yardage alone, for course rating purposes, we would rate silver and red equally. But because they present such different looks at the hole, we need to evaluate both tees individually.

It seems like every course we rate we discover something we haven’t rated previously. My fabulous course rating team might end up taking multiple sets of detailed information due to the quirkiness we encounter. We don’t train for quirks, we just deal with them!

Questions? Contact Kelly or Gretchen in the OGA Handicapping & Course Rating Department at (503) 981-4653 x226 or Click Here to Email Your Question