Who wants to play a 5 hour round of golf? Who likes to wait for 5 minutes on every tee box for the group ahead to clear the fairway?
NOT METRO SENIORS PLAYERS!!! And our golf course partners don’t like it either.
DON’T KNOW OUR RULES ON PACE OF PLAY AND READY GOLF – CLICK HERE
WE DO MEASURE PACE – SLOW PLAY IS MONITORED – CLICK HERE
Want to see more about how we monitor pace – CLICK HERE
Over many years the most frequent complaint from members and courses is Pace of Play.
Your Officer and Board of Governors have made many changes in rules and operations over the last several years. You – our members – have also accepted the challenge to “Pick up the Pace” with Ready Golf and a great attitude to help everyone.
Now our starting tee foursomes frequently finish in 3 3/4 to 4 hours. Almost all tee groups have shown that they can finish in less than 4 1/2 hours. Our partner courses have noticed and are happy to have us on their schedule.
So why all the CONTINUING interest?
Every year, we have new members. Some members are getting more “senior”. We can be “forgetful”. Little reminders, nudges can help.
More important, it only takes one SLOW tee group to cause HUGE delays!
One group falling behind by only 1 minute per hole would come in about 25 minutes behind the group ahead. A gap of two empty holes!
Worse still – this slowdown would delay EVERYONE behind by at least 20 to 30 minutes. From 40 to 100 following players could have a miserable round approaching 5 hours or more.
WORTHY OF REPEATING – If your group is slow by 20 minutes, you just wasted somewhere between 200 to 400 MANHOURS of your fellow members time in delays.
Want to see more about how we monitor pace – CLICK HERE
Really…data from 6 to 8 years ago
Steven – You are correct the dat her is OLD”. However, I used this as an example of how we did the initial work. We collected start and finish times from paper scorecards for about 40,000 rounds of golf. Very time consuming for an all volunteer operation.
Dennis Black currently chairs the Pace committee. Plus the DVPs and Tournament Committee are fully engaged. If you want to help, please consider volunteering. This is a never ending effort.
Comparing to Today
The courses and most of our players stay pretty much the same. Still par 72, 18 holes, 5500 yards. Same average 20 Index golfer (just a year older).
What are the biggest changes each year – our added new players – who may not know or embrace ready golf. We have to constantly emphasize and encourage Ready Golf and that Pace is very important.
Today Each Division VP is now collecting and handling his division data. Each DVP is also responsible for enforcing Pace in his division. The technology varies so we can’t get complete comparisons across all 5 divisions, 700 golfers, 11,000 rounds annually.
We took extensive data from 2016 through 2019, 10,000 rounds of golf each year. We found that fastest groups out first were essentially the same – hard to play faster than 3:45 for a foursome. We found that the VAST MAJORITY of players could easily play in the 4 to 4 1/2 hour range.
Most important, we also identified the very few chronically slow members and help them improve. Simply asking helps a lot.
Then the data guided major changes in how we managed events.
Shotgun starts and Reverse Shotgun starts were THE WORST and we eliminated almost all of these.
We put a maximum on the strokes per hole, now Quad Bogey.
We added more tee selections (3 tees now) and encouraged shorter hitters to use the forward tees.
READY GOLF has been emphasized.
All of this was done while COVID was operating, with major changes in our Handicap/Scoring Software and while moving to scheduled tee times.
AND adding the new Metro Plus Division.
Golf League US allows us to collect start tee times, but we cannot yet collect finish times – currently manual paper Eventually (soon??) we should have a way to collect finish times in the Golf League software. With that we can do more current analysis.
The overall results today are quite good. BUT – we can still have a bad day. One slow group will add 10 to 40 minutes to play for groups following. Each group has to enforce pace within their foursome. They have to stay up with the groups ahead.