Any handy way to create and track handicaps for a small society?

milltown

I'm thinking Excel spreadsheet or some such.

A small group of us in work have started going out fairly regularly. Some have only taken up golf, some have been playing a few years but haven't gotten any better (me) and some played years ago and were in the single figures but put on the poor mouth and use the rusty excuse.

Net result is; we all play off 28 for now. Resulting scores range from 8 points to 51 points. Obviously some savage cutting is required for some! Beyond cutting the high scorers a few strokes I would like some way of keeping proper tabs on scores and handicaps. There are some "programs" out there, just well done excel sheets but they are designed for yanks and all require a "course rating" to be entered, which I can't find mentioned on any scorecards or on the GUI website. Can anyone shed any light on these ratings? Also they need the "slope" which I am presuming is the SSS figure on the cards.

If they could be made to suit our needs I may be tempted to buy one of these shareware spreadsheets. Otherwise does anybody know of an alternative way to do what I suggest?

Many thanks,
Milltown

copacetic

you can use gametrack which is a free online tool and just create a group with everyone in it, it gives a good stab at handicaps (estimates mine as 10.5 when I am off 13 - I tend only to put in my better scores so thats about right!). They use a different system in the states, we have standard scratch score, they combine the course rating and slope to basically do the same thing. However I wouldn't worry about that for a society. A lot of the irish courses are already on here too..

http://www.freegolfinfo.com/gametrack3/putting_green.asp

milltown

Looks great, thanks!
They also give the rating for Irish courses so it could make the afforementioned excel sheets an option too.

copacetic

be careful with it, the rating just comes from people entering the SSS into them, so they are just the SSS for the courses...