My US Handicap

The reason I’ve spent the last 4 posts, and several thousand words, comparing handicapping systems, is that it occurred to me that I might get some readers from the US, who think “What’s the big deal about getting down to scratch?”.

I believe, having done the research on the topic now, that it is considerably more difficult to become a scratch golfer in the UK system than it is with the US system.

In order to compare my experiences of both systems, I wanted to construct my handicap using the USGA method. All courses in Scotland have been USGA rated, so I can easily convert my scores from Scotland as I have kept all of my scorecards, however almost no courses in England have been rated. So I have rated my home course myself, for which I have a database of all rounds I’ve ever played on it. The USGA people will say that this isn’t accurate as I’m not a trained course rater, however I have compared the rating of courses I have played in Scotland, with my home course, and I am very happy that the Course Rating I have ended up with is an accurate Course Rating. To get the Bogey Rating I have looked through the database of all rounds played in the last year of bogey golfers (handicap 18-22), which involves a sample size of over 1,000 rounds, and taken the average of the top half of those scores. I worked the data several different ways and a consistent Bogey Rating came out every time. All of the above gives me an accurate Course and Slope Rating for my home course.

I’ve often taken stick for keeping databases of golf related information, however without this information I wouldn’t have been able to construct my US handicap since 2007, so it’s been worth it’s weight in gold for this exercise.

The graph to the left shows my UK Handicap (blue) v my US handicap (yellow) v my Target (red), since I started playing golf seriously again in 2007.

To start with, it’s no coincidence that the last 2 weeks are the only time that my US handicap has been higher than my UK handicap. This is because I had a really good summer in 2009, and I am now losing those good scores, and am replacing them with higher scores as I am playing during the winter for the first time. This links in with their being no allowance in the US system for playing conditions, it is incredibly difficult to play to the Course Rating in a UK winter.

You may also notice that in general, my US handicap is lower than my UK handicap, this may be as I play mainly in more favourable than average conditions, although I do believe that for lower handicappers, because only the best 10 of 20 scores are being counted, it is a lot easier to reduce a handicap. In the UK system you need to be shooting sub-par rounds to be reducing your handicap by any tangible difference.

You may also notice that there is much more variance in the US handicap, the ups and downs are much sharper. I don’t think this is a bad thing at all, if anything it shows how difficult it is to adjust a UK handicap realistically when a player’s ability changes.

Last summer, under the US system, my handicap would actually have got as low as 0.9, under the UK system it didn’t get any lower than 2.5.

From now on, any handicaps that I post will contain my UK and US handicap, so that any stateside readers can compare my progress. The goal of this project, and associated blog, remains to become a scratch golfer under the UK system. When that happens, I know that I will have earned it.