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It’s Tee Time in India!

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In a country where the definition of sport is one and only Cricket, India is seeing a rise in the popularity of Golf. Driven by the country’s economic boom, which has produced a 300 million strong middle-class, Callaway forecasts that India’s potential golf market will grow at a rate of 25 to 30 percent over the next few years, compared to 2 to 3 percent in the U.S.

Unlike the traditional golf market which is mainly targeted at an older population,  golf in India is generating huge interest among the young, especially those from middle and upper-income families who can afford to take lessons. Continue reading “It’s Tee Time in India!”

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Tracking Your Game to Improve your Performance

MyScorecard members have a diverse array of experiences as well as stories and lessons that we can all learn from. One of our members, Shawn Augustson, is a student at the College of Golf and writes the blog Golf with Shawn. In this post he shares some of his most recent lessons.

In order to improve your golf game and become a better player, it’s essential to have an updated strengths and weakness profile. Keyword being UPDATED… you will want to continually track your progress. If someone were to ask you how your game went and you replied with “It was alright. I hit my irons well, but the rest of my round was bad.” This would be an analog response. You want to be thinking DIGITALLY, and be more specific. This is what will help you improve.

I will give you an example, I am a student at the College of Golf in Port Saint Luce, FL. In my swing fundamentals class with Dr. TJ Tomasi (Golf Magazine Top 100 teacher) we had to track the digital information from each of our rounds and be able to compare them to a tour player. When I would look at my putts and see that I was 2 putting across the board I thought I was bad at putting.

Percent of Putts Holed by DistanceAs I began to track other statistics from each of my rounds I discovered that my putting was not the problem because my first putt was always from around 30 Feet! The problem was with my approach. I wasn’t getting to the green in regulation and when I was on the green I was barely there. According to Dave Pelz and the extensive research he has done, any putts from 15 feet and beyond your best case scenario is 1 in 10 for holing it, even for the tour player.

My putting turned out to be alright because I would lag putt and then tap in. From the distance I was coming from this was good. With this information, I was then able to start looking at my decisions from 100 yards, and make better choices in order to get on and be able to one putt. Continue reading “Tracking Your Game to Improve your Performance”

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Tee off towards the whites!

There may be many stunning golf courses throughout the world, but the Ice Golf course in Uummannaq, Greenland stands a step ahead.

Uummannnaq, the coldest course in the world, is located 600 km north of the Arctic Circle and since 1997 has been the home to the World Ice Golf Championship.

The picturesque par-36 9-hole course (with your typical mix of five par 4s, two par 3s and two par 5s), is located between two glacial icebergs – the moving ice results in a constantly changing layout as weather conditions fluctuate. Excluding the backdrop of huge mountains of ice glistening in the sun, Continue reading “Tee off towards the whites!”

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Golf Around the World

One of our goals for 2011 is to bring you relevant and interesting posts about the handicap, improving your game, and the world of golf around you.

To start the year off, we are launching a new series Golf Around the World by our contributor M.S. Greene highlighting some of the more interesting courses you may not know about.

We’ll be producing a Scorecard as well – if you’ve played more than a quarter of these courses, you should consider yourself a true explorer of the golf world!

If you are an amateur golf blogger and have an interest in posting to our blog, send us an email with a link to your work. We’re always looking for posts that will help enlighten and entertain our members.

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Member Tournaments – Turkey Shoot Out

Thanksgiving Tournament
We’re glad to bring you another tournament created by the West Puget Sound Men’s Club, a club that uses MyScorecard to help make their rounds more enjoyable and fun. We appreciate their sharing their format with us.

In the turkey shoot out, each player will be allowed to “shoot” FOUR turkey holes as they occur on the course. Dead turkeys are replaced by a par score. Fire your shotgun shells early or save them for the end. You choose (some years the club plays that anything hire than a triple-bogey necessitates the use of a shotgun shell).

At the end, you will subtract a specific number of additional strokes (from chart below) and one-half stroke for every unused “shotgun shell”. (Higher handicappers will receive more after-round strokes to compensate for their reduced ammunition.). 1st and 2nd place receive a price. Continue reading “Member Tournaments – Turkey Shoot Out”

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Golf Exorcism for Halloween

If you are interested in organizing a club tournament this Halloween, here is an interesting format used by the West Puget Sound Men’s Club, a club that uses MyScorecard to help make their rounds more enjoyable and fun. We appreciate their sharing their annual tournament with us.

Halloween Golf Tournament

Format

The tournament is a regular tournament with two twists:

1) Based on your handicap (refer to chart below) you will be allowed to exorcise a specified number of demon holes before the round. Just declare the hole in advance and write in a par for each.
2) After the round you will be allowed to subtract a specific number of strokes for your handicap.

Strategy

So you say you’re not afraid of ghosts?

You may wish to use your exorcisms to play “easy” holes aggressively without fear of a big number. Should you birdie one of your selected demon holes, not only do you get to keep the birdie (you can erase the par you wrote on the card, then enter the birdie,), but that exorcism becomes a wild card for you to use after the round on any hole that took a bite out of you. A wild card is a powerful tool – thus the tough decision is whether to choose the hardest hole, or perhaps the easiest hole and play it aggressively. Continue reading “Golf Exorcism for Halloween”

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You’re Better than Average

You may have had a tough day out on the golf course, but here’s something to keep in the back of your head.

Despite decades of scientific improvements in clubs and balls, more physical training, and all sorts of new ideas on improving your swing, the average golf score remains the same: around 100 for 18 holes.

90However, for MyScorecard members, that number is between 90 and 91 (for reference, the average handicap is just under 16). Some people may attribute it to the Hawthorne effect, which is at least partially true, but we attribute at least a portion of it to the fact that our members are just better.

So do a little dance – you deserve it.

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Welcome Digital Divot Members

We’d like to welcome the members of Digital Divot who have joined the MyScorecard service.

Knowing the importance of proper handicapping, Digital Divot has partnered with MyScorecard.com to transition their members’ accounts, scores, and handicaps to the MyScorecard service. MyScorecard has worked closely with the USGA from inception, building a system that adheres to the there rules and regulations, avoiding the unfortunate issues that we experienced.

As endorsed by Joshua Richards, owner and developer of Digital Divot: MyScorecard provides a place for members who loved Digital Divot to continue with all the great features that they enjoyed on our site, as well as the many new features MyScorecard offers. We’re glad to be able to partner to provide our members with a great experience and smooth transition from our site.

If you know of a web site that might benefit from partnering with MyScorecard, please don’t hesitate to let us know and we would be happy to reach out to them.

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The Quirks of the Slope

We will sometimes choose some of the more interesting questions asked by our members to share with you. Our most recent one comes from a member who shot a 70 on a course with a rating of 71.3 and slope of 132 (something we can all aspire to). When entering his score into MyScorecard, the differential read -1.1, which was actually less than the -1.3 the difference between the score (70) and course rating (71.3). Wouldn’t you expect that if you played a harder course, it should be greater than the difference of the rating and score? Continue reading “The Quirks of the Slope”

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The Immaculate Par

My fellow competitor left his first putt a woeful 5 feet short of the hole, and as he approached his ball it was clear that he wanted to finish. Finish he would – with style. As he read the break, I turned my back to the hole and began the walk down the slope towards my mark, which sat some 30 or 40 feet from the cup on the other side of the green. When I arrived, I turned back towards the hole expectingCheater! to see my competitor partway through his pre-putt routine. Turns out he’d already hit and missed the 5-footer, leaving it an inch left of the cup. I caught him just in time to witness the most ridiculous, yet brilliantly straightforward, act of cheating one could imagine: hand picks ball off of green, hand puts ball into hole, hand extracts ball from hole as if the 5-footer had dropped. Bogey magically turned to par.

“CHEATER! Are you joking? Really? I’m standing right here! Did you think you could get away with that? I’ve sweated every 2-footer all day long and you’re going to pull a f*#@ing stunt like that in broad daylight?” Continue reading “The Immaculate Par”