Handicap Allocations

The Lake Valley Golf Club Handicap Committee reminds you to please accurately post all of your scores.  If you have any questions about what is required, please consult either the written material located by the handicap computer or a member of the Handicap Committee.  If you have questions relating to operation of the handicap computer, the Pro Shop Staff can also be of assistance.

New scorecards were put into use at Lake Valley Golf Club during the 2003 active season.  You will notice that the hole-by-hole handicap allocations have been changed.  The purpose of these allocations is to determine the holes where you will receive handicap strokes in a net score competition or the holes where the higher handicap player will receive strokes in a match play competition.  The intent of the allocations is to maximize the number of holes that are halved in a match between two players with different handicaps. This is done by assigning handicap strokes to the higher handicap player on those holes where he most likely will need strokes in order to halve the holes, and by “wheeling” (providing the higher handicap player with a number of strokes equal to the difference between the handicaps of the players).  In these types of competitions, the difficulty of making par on a hole is not an effective indicator of the need for a stroke.  The correct method of determining the need for a stroke on a hole is to determine the difference between the average gross scores on the hole for players of different handicaps.  The first handicap hole being the hole with the largest gross score difference.

It is the responsibility of the Handicap Committee at each course to assign the hole-by-hole handicap allocations.  Since some of the back nine holes at Lake Valley Golf Club were revised in the fall of 2001, the Lake Valley Golf Club Handicap Committee undertook the task of reassigning the allocations using scores from the 2002 active season.  To determine the new allocations, 800 scores from the red, white, blue, and black tees from properly completed 18 hole scorecards were entered into software in our handicap computer.  The software uses a linear regression analysis to determine the differences in gross scores for players of differing handicaps for each hole. This method ranked the holes from 1 to 18 in descending order of these calculated differences, with the number 1 ranked hole being the hole where the first handicap stroke in a match is provided.  Adjustments were then made that included making the allocations of the front and back nine holes odd and even respectively, and avoiding having too many strokes falling on holes early or late on each nine.  The results are the allocations you will see on the new scorecards.