What's your Handicap?
GBN makes team assignments for each tournament it conducts. The goal is to divide the players into "equally competitive" teams. We want to make sure all teams reflect the full range of skill levels represented by the players who wish to play in each tournament.
In order to achieve equally competitive teams, we ask each player to provide us with his or her handicap. While most golfers are familiar with this term, many are unclear as to what it represents or how it is calculated.
In simplest terms, a player's handicap is a number that reflects a golfer’s skill level. According to a Golf Digest study, this number ranges from 0 to 35 with an average of 14 for men, and from 0 to 40 with an average of 26 for women. The number reflects a player's scoring potential relative to par, so low-handicap golfers are better players than high-handicappers.
The USGA website provides excruciating detail as to how this number should ideally be calculated, and it provides tools and guidance in helping a player determine his or her handicap. If you use this or some similar tool to calculate your handicap, then that's the number you should record on the sign-in sheet for each GBN tournament.
If you don't track your handicap, here are some guidelines to help you decide what numeric value to report for your handicap:
If you'd like to start tracking your handicap, check out the free app provided by Golf Digest.
- Think of the last 5 or 6 times you played golf on a course that you'd consider to be of average difficulty.
- What was your best score from those outings?
- Subtract the total Par score for that course from your best score. For example, if your best score was 86, and Par for the course was 71, then the difference is 15.
- Take the difference you calculated in Step 3, multiply by 0.96, and then round up or down to the nearest whole number. Continuing the example, 15 x 0.96 = 14.4, which rounds to 14.
- Record this number on the sign-in sheet for today's GBN tournament.
If you'd like to start tracking your handicap, check out the free app provided by Golf Digest.
Thanks for helping us ensure that GBN tournaments are fun and fair for everyone!