Your New WHS Index

It’s your lowest that it has been in the last 365 days.

it’s not that difficult to grasp surely?

Did you not play golf last year? At changeover all your old scores were converted to WHS and your handicap index calculated from each round on a rolling basis. Your lowest index couldn't have been on the 1st January since we weren't playing golf on that day. If that was your actual lowest index in the last twelve months, it must relate to a round played last year before lockdown and when we were playing handicap qualifiers. So I would suspect that it would have come from a round played before the 1st November.

The winner of a local open comp a few weeks back was a visitor who had 56 points off 41. Now if I could just knock 20 shots off my score I'd be in the plus HC range 😂. Some of the local members were absolutely apoplectic and a few mentioned putting HC caps on entrants.

That said if I look at it without screaming bandit for a moment.... I started off regularly shooting 110+ when I started last summer and I score mostly in the mid-low 90s with a PB of 90 (current HC is 17 on WHS). My initial HC was 21 and the best of my first three cards was 105 IIRC.

Had our HC secretary assigned me an initial HC of 30+ to match my cards and had I not played many competitions, it's conceivable that I could have turned in a score around 48-50 points this year.

Is it possible for someone to improve this much in a year as a complete beginner (15 to 20 shots)?

• 100% yes, I've done it myself.

Should the winner's HC have been in the high 20s or low 30s and should their HC secretary assign something in this range?

• Possibly, I don't know enough or have enough experience in the area.

This is something as a h/c sec that I dread. You get a score like that coming in and you know the jungle drums are starting up and the arrows will soon follow. I'd imagine that h/c sec is thanking his lucky stars that it was an away score 😂. I've given out 54 indexes (two iirc) in my time and both did improve, but not to that extent. One had 48 points and the other had something like 38 points iirc.

When you're getting initial handicap cards in the 130+ range, it's very hard to find a good reason not to award the maximum index. You know they will improve, but you don't know when they will. It's easier at the lower level, you can put in an adjustment of 3 or 4 and usually that works out well enough. But it's very hard to pick a number that's going to be accurate when they are so big. And you really do have to have a good reason to cut someone's allocated index by what would need to be over one third.

Without knowing that guy's record (if he even has one of any size) you'd have to assume that he's early enough in his counting rounds (maybe five or six at the most - based on the large improvement) so I would think his new index is down by around 10 to 15. One of our 54 index guys went from 54 to 36 in three rounds without scoring anything like 56 points. As I said, best was 38 points.

The bottom line for h/c secs is that you watch new indexes carefully. WHS does front load by always picking the best score in the early stages and you can reasonably assume that a new guy with a high index is only really going to get one good score before the system cuts them back.

Have you no online access to enter scores? Most (if not all) of the major software vendors have this.

Club is using intelligent golf. Can see link to enter a non competitive score. I will look at it tomorrow after my round to see if its available. Possible that the club has this disabled so that cards/scores are only entered via kiosk or an admin.

Yeah, that's pretty much the same with all the software packages. Most clubs implemented it when the rules changed on scorecards because of covid. Surprised that some still have that turned off.

By the sound of it, he'd have had the same result under CONGU. Hadn't shot near his handicap for a year, so no cuts and probably a bunch of 0.1s.

Calculation for score differential is (SR/113)*(AGS-CR-PCC), so the closer your AGS gets to CR, the less the adjustment is. It effectively comes down to a multiply by zero calculation or close enough to be inconsequential.

PCC is calculated automatically overnight by the WHS portal. It's not done at club software level.

we have had about 4 guys winning off 50pts plus this year.. A few weeks ago at our captains qualifier we had a 63 leading on day one and then a 59 on the next day... it is impossible to win an overall from Cat 1 with Cat 4 golfers now winning around 70% of the all the overall prizes...I think this is wide open to abuse if you have 2 guys who want to do it...

If he was playing off 10 he could have a CH of 11, which would bring his score differential down one extra stroke. Whereas the other player may have a CH and PH equal to each other so no impact to the differential

Could he have had a couple of birdies and 1 big number that is giving him 1 better for adjusted gross?

The CH handicap is only used to calulate the AGS in the event of scoring over the nett double bogey for your CH, or not finishing a hole in Stableford. It is the AGS that is used to calculate the score differential. In the example given the AGS were identical.

It is, sorry, mixing things up, changed my post above...to a different question

You could also be correct re an ESR

The guy off 10 would have had an esr or -1 applied to all of his last 20 score differentials. The guy off 7 probably not.