Handicap Systems
I am old enough to remember the good old days of handicapping where you joined a golf clubs, took a series of lessons from the club professional and submitted 3 score cards from which the handicap committee determined your initial handicap.
Thereafter the handicap secretary would review your handicap based on the scores that you submitted in monthly medals and stableford’s but reductions in handicap were arbitrary and increases in handicap difficult to come by.
Then in the 1980’s the English Golf Union created a universal handicapping system taking into consideration the course difficulty on the day by creating a standard scratch score and competition scratch scores for the day and handicaps were adjusted on the day by decimal points as we all had two handicaps, a playing handicap and an actual handicap.
Then I moved to Spain in 2004 and soon discovered the joys of the slope handicap system developed by the European Golf Union and adopted by the Spanish Golf Federation.
Only then to discover that most golf societies ,where we all play our golf, all have their versions of the system making cross comparison of society handicaps almost impossible to do.
What a mess eh!
Anyway hold on to your hats because between them all the major golf unions and associations across the world have decided to introduce the World Handicapping System with the same system in operation across the world.
I will keep you updated with these developments but it will be interesting to see how our local golf societies adopt these new handicapping rules.