I'm a duffer when it comes to understanding how CSS is worked out, but we have a real ongoing problem at our club and it is having a huge impact on handicaps.
Our SSS from the whites is 71 against a par of 72. It is the norm for CSS to be 70, and not unheard of for it to creep as low as 69.
We are a proprietorship club and as a consequence we seem to play a lot of stablefords, the rationale being that they are quicker and won't congest the pay and players who are out behind the competition field.
We also have very limited competition fields - generally around 80 competitors - and a good proportion of those often shoot their handicap or better, with some very high scores often being recorded. During a stableford in the summer the winning score was 50 points, second 49 and third place 47.
Whilst we have some regular participants, we also see a number of players playing in only three or four competitions a year. This is in part because the start sheets fill up very quickly and people often miss out, and partly because many only want to play the minimum number of qualifiers needed to keep an active handicap, and they will go for the stablefords because it allows them a bad hole whilst not destroying their chances of picking up a voucher. I have at least one mate who refuses to play medals!! We tend to find that those who only play a handful of events are often those who score well, doubtless in part because they practice all year long and then enter competitions when they fancy their chances. Or am I just being cynical?!
The consequnce is that regular golfers like me, who have a handicap which is about right, find it very difficult to get cut despite often playing two or three shots under handicap in a competition. In stableford we generally need to shoot 36 points just to buffer. This is having the impact of keeping many handicaps artificially high.
My question is two-fold;
1) Can someone explain (in the language of an idiot -me!) how CSS is calculated, and
2) Does having a limited field impact on CSS?
Our SSS from the whites is 71 against a par of 72. It is the norm for CSS to be 70, and not unheard of for it to creep as low as 69.
We are a proprietorship club and as a consequence we seem to play a lot of stablefords, the rationale being that they are quicker and won't congest the pay and players who are out behind the competition field.
We also have very limited competition fields - generally around 80 competitors - and a good proportion of those often shoot their handicap or better, with some very high scores often being recorded. During a stableford in the summer the winning score was 50 points, second 49 and third place 47.
Whilst we have some regular participants, we also see a number of players playing in only three or four competitions a year. This is in part because the start sheets fill up very quickly and people often miss out, and partly because many only want to play the minimum number of qualifiers needed to keep an active handicap, and they will go for the stablefords because it allows them a bad hole whilst not destroying their chances of picking up a voucher. I have at least one mate who refuses to play medals!! We tend to find that those who only play a handful of events are often those who score well, doubtless in part because they practice all year long and then enter competitions when they fancy their chances. Or am I just being cynical?!
The consequnce is that regular golfers like me, who have a handicap which is about right, find it very difficult to get cut despite often playing two or three shots under handicap in a competition. In stableford we generally need to shoot 36 points just to buffer. This is having the impact of keeping many handicaps artificially high.
My question is two-fold;
1) Can someone explain (in the language of an idiot -me!) how CSS is calculated, and
2) Does having a limited field impact on CSS?
