Should Courses Enact a HC Check on Tees

Based on the two-three years of time tracking I did for two courses, I would say is there little correlation between handicap and pace of play.

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Does this correlation include tees played, or just handicap and pace of play? I agree handicap and pace have nothing to do with each other, but when you add tees/distance to the equation it becomes a factor (probably a minor factor but still some impact on time to finish a round).


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Going to regret this but...eff it. Speaking of misguided reasoning, do you have any data to back up your claims in a prior post of yours about the order of reasons for slow pace of play? Surely with such strong convictions on this you'd have something to back it up.

here is one quote from a golf digest about a study that was done

"The average round of golf in America takes 4 hours, 17 minutes, according to Lucius Riccio, Ph.D., who analyzed 40,460 rounds. The average time of dewsweepers, or the first group out, is 3:46. The length and Slope Rating of a golf course has almost no correlation with pace. The only statistically significant variable is how busy a course is. Golfers move like cars on the interstate. Rush hour is bad. Make too many merges too quickly, and gridlock ensues.

So the most effective change course owners can make is to increase tee-time intervals. In the 2014 LPGA Tour season, the average round time was reduced 14 minutes by switching from 10- to 11-minute intervals".


thats just one thing from one article.
course set up was another.
But just from years of watching people on the greens and playing with them, i have no doubt just how many people think they are putting for the us open win and thier routines, lack of ready golf and repeated antics for every single putt is far more a pace problem than seeing hackers hit from tees too long for thier game. No tto mention the lack of awareness throughout thier entire round and the way they "chose' to move about as though they just dont care or are not capable of or just dont know better.
 
While its an interesting thought, people who pay to play should be able to play whichever tees they choose. If the club wants to institute that policy that is their choice but they should be prepared to accept that they might not get as much traffic. I remember the course we played at RR in Ohio had a HC policy for any tee times in before 8:30 I wonder how that works out for them?
 
Does this correlation include tees played, or just handicap and pace of play? I agree handicap and pace have nothing to do with each other, but when you add tees/distance to the equation it becomes a factor (probably a minor factor but still some impact on time to finish a round).


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Does not. Which is why I didn't touch on that in my post.

There are always going to be ifs when talking pace of play. The biggest difference we saw was when reminding people of ready golf. We saw over 20 min of improvement in pace when trying to remind and teach people ready golf. This included having reminders in the carts and having our starter talk to groups about some of the aspects of ready golf.

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Does not. Which is why I didn't touch on that in my post.

There are always going to be ifs when talking pace of play. The biggest difference we saw was when reminding people of ready golf. We saw over 20 min of improvement in pace when trying to remind and teach people ready golf. This included having reminders in the carts and having our starter talk to groups about some of the aspects of ready golf.

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Early in his career Jack Nicklaus was criticized for slow play. He thought about it and changed his habit of waiting for shorter hitters to play their shot, to one of walking ahead and being "ready" when it was his turn to play.
 
I love golf, period. I love people playing the game, enjoying their time, and learning and progressing as players. However, pace of play remains my biggest pet peeve. I can’t stand a 5 hour tilt. The one thing I’ve noticed is how many guys tee up off the blues when they have no business being there. I you can’t crack 90 why are you back there? When I played Ballybunion in Ireland they checked my USGA GHIN , which was a 6 at the time, and forced me to play the whites. I checked the ego and had a blast! Should we enact the same policies here to increase pace of play?

I would not have a problem with them doing this. Sounds like a great way to convince people to have more fun out there.
 
I shoot in the mid-80's, and I'm perfectly capable of a mid-90's day, which will generally have nothing to do with how far I hit the ball off the tee.

There's lots of ways to be a 15 index; not all of them involve being short or wild off the tee.
 
Part of me says yes, but I also think we should take a page out of what Singapore does where you have to get a license to play golf (they are very limited on space and it is super expensive to play). Mostly I think that just for etiquette training and getting newbies to the game to know a bit of how things are for their own comfort level.

But at the same time, I played in a match play tournament and it was a shotgun start. My group (all 13-15 handicappers) played directly behind the lead group (the pros from both courses, plus the lowest handicappers from both clubs, ours is a +4, the other was scratch). The highest handicap in the group in front of us was probably 4 at most, and yet we waited on them all day when they were a full hole behind the group in front of them and we finished our round in just under 5 hours, they took at least another 15 minutes after that.

For our course recommendations are that if you are a 4 or better you play the black tees, these guys were playing the blue tees so it wasn't that they were playing too far back. Slow play is not just caused by people playing further back than their skill level would dictate, although that issue definitely plays a part for many slow rounds. So maybe it would help some, I don't think it would eradicate slow play, or even make a real dent.
 
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While its an interesting thought, people who pay to play should be able to play whichever tees they choose. If the club wants to institute that policy that is their choice but they should be prepared to accept that they might not get as much traffic. I remember the course we played at RR in Ohio had a HC policy for any tee times in before 8:30 I wonder how that works out for them?

eh, not as always that simple... I pay for my car each month, doesn't mean I can drive 100 MPH. A course could easily enact any policy it wants, if you don't like it then pay and play somewhere else.
 
I would not have a problem with them doing this. Sounds like a great way to convince people to have more fun out there.

like I said earlier, its not a simple one change fix all idea... but it would certainly help.
 
I would probably agree that it's an easy thing to target as a major pace problem, but at a 29 I regularly finish in 3.5 hour rounds if i'm out early enough on the weekend. I do love when I see a scorecard that suggests a proper tee based on HC, but at the same time HC isn't always about length, it could be more mental than anything. I do not play from the tips but just because I have a high HC doesn't make me willing to play from the senior's tees either.

A slow golfer is going to be slow, even if they play from the forward tees, and you take their phone away. It's a mindset problem more than anything in most cases.
 
While its an interesting thought, people who pay to play should be able to play whichever tees they choose. If the club wants to institute that policy that is their choice but they should be prepared to accept that they might not get as much traffic. I remember the course we played at RR in Ohio had a HC policy for any tee times in before 8:30 I wonder how that works out for them?

You make a great point here and it's a solid compromise between what the OP is talking about and the freedom to play where ever the paying golfer wants. At the risk of sounding snobbish, if all else was equal, I'd rather play at a course with a handicap policy that promotes better pace of play than one that runs all willy nilly.

eh, not as always that simple... I pay for my car each month, doesn't mean I can drive 100 MPH. A course could easily enact any policy it wants, if you don't like it then pay and play somewhere else.

Speed limit is the law, pace of play isn't. Not exactly apples to apples, but I see where you are coming from. Heck, you might get more people interested in a course with a policy like this if you spin it the right way for golfers.
 
I agree with JDTox. I don't think telling people where they need to play from is the answer, and will most likely drive people away from playing certain courses. Also, there isn't always a link between hcp and length. I regularly play with a few guys that are short off the tee, but single digit indexes. Like Tahoebum said, most of the issues I've seen come from the greens, and around the greens. The amount of time taken for putting routines, and people not even looking at the break until it's their turn to putt, adds so much time to a round. Limit the time on the greens marking and reading breaks from 4 angles after it's your turn, and you've shaved a good hour off the round.

I don't necessarily know if the Marshalls policing the issue is the answer either. For the most part, they're volunteers or part time retirement gigs. You see them at some courses where they don't do anything, and at other courses where they're harassing people for nothing... or the same guy doing either depending on his mood that day. Example... we were playing a local course last year. It was a slow day and not a whole lot of people on the course. When we teed off, the group in front of us were on the 4th hole. The group behind us didn't tee off til we were on the 3rd hole. The Marshall started harassing us on the 6th hole that we were 3 holes behind and that we either needed to speed it up or skip a hole. When we made the turn, he actually got verbally abusive about it. Funny thing is the cart GPS said we were on a just over 4 hour pace (4some) and were 18 minutes ahead of the expected pace. Group behind us was still 3 holes back. My brother almost went to blows with the guy when he got out of his marshall cart and started cussing at him. Same marshal 2 weeks earlier... we were 30 minutes behind schedule making the turn and never said a word.
 
One of the tougher local courses used to have a thing where you could not play before 9am on weekends I think unless you were below a `10 or 15. Seeing as that is no longer posted on their website I imagine it didn't go over very well.
 
One of the tougher local courses used to have a thing where you could not play before 9am on weekends I think unless you were below a `10 or 15. Seeing as that is no longer posted on their website I imagine it didn't go over very well.

Would be hard for me to ever going back even if my HC fell in line. I play with 3 guys between 9-15 but because one of the foursome is a high HC you'd knick the group? Crazy to think. #growthegame
 
No. I am not a fan of people playing tees outside their zone but who am I to tell people what they can and can't do when they are paying for the right to play.
 
I just don’t know why if someone hits driver 230 they’re playing tees at 6900 yards. The game is hard enough.

Ego. Though I don't see the appeal of hitting driver, fairway wood, and wedge into most par 4's. If someone wants to play like the pros, then mimic what they do, which is hit irons into greens.

A couple of years ago a guy joined me on the senior tees (though you could see him battling his ego), he has always played the Blue tees. After the round he couldn't thank me enough. He shot the lowest score of his golf career, was hitting irons into par 4's and on par threes, and reaching greens in regulation he could never reach before. He said it was the most fun he ever had playing golf.
 
sometimes the right tees are not available. Some buddies and I just took what will be for them the golf trip of a lifetime centered around playing Edgewood in Lake Tahoe. They rely on me to select the boxes, so the starter and I were discussing it. He started with color and I asked for anything in and I gave him a yardage range and slope that would be enjoyable for the other three guys. He laughed and said, "We have that but you can't play them" with the plane inference being they were the ladies tees. So the guys who tee off about 180 are now trying to play are I think it was about 6400. Their tee shots leave them long second and often long third shots. As one of the guys, who was as frustrated as I have ever seen him, said several times "I am not loving playing my worst golf ever on the nicest course I will ever play".

Thing is...he was not playing bad, he was playing too long. And just a little offline in his landing zone meant trouble instead of safety. Meanwhile, I was having an above average day and routinely between 260 and 310 off the tee. On a completely unrelated note, my partner and I were really enjoying the course and were up I think it was 11 shots at the turn.

The point of this anecdote is to enforce yardages based on accuracy, you need appropriate tee boxes. If even a relatively high end course like Edgewood doesn't have one they allow to be played...you have an unenforceable policy.
 
No. I am not a fan of people playing tees outside their zone but who am I to tell people what they can and can't do when they are paying for the right to play.

While I agree here, don't we do that now based on pace? They pay the same amount and are "required" to play with in a certain time.

My issue with this is let's say someone is a higher handicap, but his issues are all irons and/or around the green. Should he/she not be allowed to play from further tees? Then you get into the entire idea of different geography plays differently. Meaning someone traveling to FL for example, from TX, might always play 6500+ and then get to FL and want to know why the course played harder when they lose roll.
 
While I agree here, don't we do that now based on pace? They pay the same amount and are "required" to play with in a certain time.

My issue with this is let's say someone is a higher handicap, but his issues are all irons and/or around the green. Should he/she not be allowed to play from further tees?

Personally, I don't think playing a forward tee is going to improve pace of play for someone who struggles to maintain it. Things like relaxes rules regarding OB and hazards would do more to speed things up. Having a max score per hole would do more as well IMHO.
 
I don't know if there is a "wrong" tee. There are golfers who can't hit the ball 200 yards, but with control and a great short game, they can compete off the "blues." And of course the opposite is true.

Slow play is caused by slow players, and it doesn't matter where they tee off from.
 
Just answering OP, didn’t read rest so sorry if repetitive. I don’t think a HC check would be a welcoming idea. It goes against anybody who doesn’t keep a HC, or anybody who hits it ridiculously long but has a terrible short game. I believe people should be allowed to play from wherever they want, so long as they keep up with the group ahead.
 
I don't know if there is a "wrong" tee. There are golfers who can't hit the ball 200 yards, but with control and a great short game, they can compete off the "blues." And of course the opposite is true.

Slow play is caused by slow players, and it doesn't matter where they tee off from.

Yep, The bold is the only correct answer. Some people are just slow.
 
I don’t think it’s a good idea for a couple reasons. 1. It would not be well recurved and would drive people away from the game 2. I don’t think playing wrong tee is the problem.

I see people playing the right tee playing slow. It’s about playing ready golf and not going to each other’s ball to watch each other hit. Or telling a long story when someone is trying to putt. Or lining up a putt from four sides only to slam it past the hole and repeat the process. I see less and less people playing the tips these days.

I agree with this. I consider myself a very fast player. In the off chance that I completely duff one off the tee, and it goes 50 yards, I can still finish the hole in just a few minutes.

Pace of play has to do with an understanding of pace and a willingness to keep pace. I played Ko Olina the other day with a father-son two some who barely ever play golf. They chose to play the forward tees (as they thought it would be best for them.) It was still PAINFULLY slow. They simply did not understand that they did not need to drive to each others ball, and constantly stand next to each other through each shot (and there were a lot of shots.) The course was empty, and it's Hawaii, so I wasn't going to pressure them to play faster. We had fun. I did insist, however, that we let a single through on 10. They guys were very cool about it.
 
While its an interesting thought, people who pay to play should be able to play whichever tees they choose. If the club wants to institute that policy that is their choice but they should be prepared to accept that they might not get as much traffic. I remember the course we played at RR in Ohio had a HC policy for any tee times in before 8:30 I wonder how that works out for them?

They are now on golfnow, so it seems like it didn't work well

As far as playing whatever tees you want it depends on the course. I have no issue with a place like Torrey Pines not allowing people to play the tips without permission, and driving it 300 doesn't man they will let you.
 
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