A couple of quick housekeeping items before we get to the meat of this week’s blog.
First, we are going to codify some rules around using other league members as subs.
Here are the steps to follow to get a sub if you cannot make it to the league on a given night:
- Please make every effort to get a sub from the sub list. We understand that this list of people who are willing to sub is quite small, but we want to try to have as close to 12 people every Thursday. This goes a long way in keeping us in good standing with the course.
- If you cannot get someone outside the league to sub for you, we will allow your partner to sub for you. Limiting the league sub to just partners keeps the focus on the team aspect of league. You can no longer use anyone in the league to sub for you – only your partner.
- If both you and your partner are not there on a given night, your opponent will be playing against your card.
- The league line-up is set at noon on Thursdays. If I am not told by noon that you will not be there and who your sub will be, we will be using your card for the night. Your score on each hole, if we are using your card, is a part of the Match Ups email that I send every week.
Secondly, we decided that will not have a mid-season major this year. It is quite difficult to get a weekend during the summer where everyone can attend. We are still planning on having our year-end major on Friday September 4th.
Now on to the topic I would like to discuss this week. Handicaps. We all want it to go down. We all look at our net scores and judge how the night went. And we are all too hard on ourselves.
Let’s be clear about what a handicap is NOT. Your handicap index is definitively NOT what you are expected to score on a given night. The USGA calculation looks at your last 20 rounds and uses your best 8 to calculate your handicap. That is only 40% of your last 20 rounds. It is not an average of your performance. Really what it is saying is what your score will be if you’re playing your best.
Your handicap index is a measure of your potential, not of your average.
In reality, if we saw that most of the league was netting 36 or better every week, that would mean that the handicaps are incorrect. At the end of the season, what I would expect to see is that we net even par or better in the 40% range. Actually, I’d bet it would be a little less than that. For the most part we are only getting in 9 holes a week, with little or no practice in between. That makes it difficult to play our best on any given night.
So, if you don’t net a 36, don’t be too hard on yourself, and when you do, go ahead and pat yourself on the back.
It does beg the question – what should you expect to hit on Thursdays? You might want to say, just take the average of the last 20 (Pete), but that actually isn’t informative. Imagine Aaron Judge is batting .333 in August. He’s 0-2 as he comes up to the plate in the 7th. His average says he has to get a hit here. He strikes out. It’s no surprise to a baseball fan. An average is not a good predictor of a single outcome. It’s a long term stat. Can we do better? Yes. But really only a little, without more data points and more complex math.
In the same way that the USGA takes your best 8, we can look at the Middle 8 to calculate your expected score range. This eliminates both your best and worst scores, so it takes care of outliers in the data. It’s more of a weighted average. (The math nerd in me hates calling it that but I’ll live)
So here you go – (the math is only a little sketchy) here are your expected score ranges based on your last 20 rounds:
If you shoot in that range, it should be no surprise. If it was better than this, you had a top night. This does assume an average course difficulty (rating 72 slope 113). If the course rating is higher than 72, expect a little higher, and a little lower if it’s below 72.
At the mid point of the year I’ll take a look at how we are doing as a league and see if we are playing as expected, until then don’t fret so much about not netting par – the handicap system doesn’t expect you to.