Liberty Lake-MeadowWood Men's Club - Tournament Handicaps

I would like to post a clarification regarding how flights are determined for tournaments.

Regarding this last tournament, I have been asked and some of you may be wondering, how a team with a lower handicap ended up in Flight 2.  In case this happens again in the future for either team events or individual events, the explanation is this:

In order to make all flights with a near equal amount of players, the flights are determined using the handicap index of the players.  (That decimal point works good for tie breaking.)  The index is determined on the Thursday prior to the tournament.

After the flights are set, then the playing handicaps are applied.  That is why there might be players of equal playing handicap in different flights.  Remember, it is all about that decimal point when calculating playing handicaps.  On top of that, if a player is eligible and plays from the gold tees, that further reduces the playing handicap.

In the case of this last tournament, the first team in Flight 2 would have had a team playing handicap of 10 had both players played from the white tees.  One player was eligible and played from the gold tees reducing his individual playing handicap by 4 and the team handicap by 2 making it an 8, which was lower than some of the handicaps in Flight 1.  There were other teams in Flight 2 with reduced playing handicaps but they weren't the number one team and therefore not as noticeable.

I hope this helps in understanding the process.  If you have any further questions feel free to give me a call.

Paul Halttunen

Tournament Chairman