By Club Captain Lance Fredericks
Earlier this year, Golf Australia made a decision to move to the USGA Handicapping System to go with the USGA Course Rating System which GA had adopted in 2008. The effect of these decisions is that all 3000 odd courses in Australia will be re-rated over the next two years with the USGA Handicapping System scheduled to be implemented in 2012.
As soon as our course is rated for both men and women under the USGA System, the new Scratch Ratings will become our ACR and AWCR until the Handicapping System is implemented. For the men this may not be different to our current ACR of 65 but most likely will be 64 which would have been the case when the next rating under the current Australian system was done. The Jamberoo course should be re-rated second half of 2010 to early 2011.
The new handicapping system will not be implemented fully until 2012 but some aspects of the system will commence to be implemented in 2010.
From 1 March 2010 the “rolling average method” will be used in the calculation of handicaps. This includes using the rolling average of the best 10 of your last 20 scores to calculate your handicap. The frequency of handicap adjustments has not yet been determined. If you have less than 20 rounds there is a table setting out the number of scores to count depending on the number of scores in your history – (9 out of 19, 8 of 18, 7 of 17 down to 1 out of 6 to 3). The effect of this rolling average is that if you have a bad score which does not make the best 10 then there will be no change to your handicap or if you have a very good score the effect will be “smoothed” by the averaging process. As each score is submitted the oldest score of the 20 drops off.
Also from 1 March 2010, for men, the use of the CCR will cease. All rounds will be measured against the ACR. Women have not used the CCR since October 2007. The 1 March date is the target but there may be delays in implementing the amendments to the Golf Link software.
From a yet to be determined date in 2010, all eligible scores will be converted to (and processed) as Stableford scores even though the event may be a Stroke or Par event. When this occurs we will ask members to score both the competition format and Stableford on their scorecards. The reason for this change “is to reduce the effect of high hole scores for handicap purposes in order to make handicaps more representative of a player’s scoring potential”. There are likely to be further changes accompanying this change.