By Susan Fornoff
O n the last day of May, two volunteer crews in khakis took to the fairways and greens of CommonGround Golf Course armed with rangefinders, clipboards and spiral-bound handbooks. And, of course, with a 5:45 a.m. start time, big cups of coffee.
They paused at each tee, walking off distances and eyeballing obstacles, engaging in spirited discussions about reductions for “lateral P.A.” and “R and R,” then stopping at each green to debate the level of its undulation. There were jokes about pi and stimping, and a long pause at the grassy mound in No. 8 fairway.
It was the CGA’s first “rate” of the year, a process by which Colorado courses are reevaluated every eight years for difficulty from each set of tees, for male and female scratch golfers (producing the rating number you see on your scorecard) and for male and female bogey golfers (producing the accompanying slope number).
“Rate” does rhyme with “debate.” And with occupations including engineer, police officer, pilot and college professor, the raters clearly relish putting on their analytic hats and hashing out the numbers.
“They’re a bunch of talkers,” says their overseer, CGA Managing Director of Club and Facility Services Aaron Guereca, with fond amusement. “Oh, they love math and they like to talk about it.”
They also love golf and the places that course rating takes them. Follow along for an inside peek at one of the CGA’s most coveted volunteer assignments.
The road to a rating starts by filling out the CGA’s volunteer interest form on coloradogolf.org. When he finally comes up for air again in October or so, Aaron will send prospects a more detailed form that includes information about orientation and trainings. His roster is set for 2023, with 41 raters lined up to do 33 rates ranging from Denver’s City Park to Castle Pines Golf Club, but, he said, “We’re always looking for course raters, especially female course raters.” Applicants should have (or, in the case of seniors, should have once had) handicaps in the range of scratch 0-5, bogey 20-26 and in between, so that they have an understanding of the course plays for those categories of golfer.
Apprentices complete a one-hour, three-part virtual training. Then everyone, even the veterans, is expected to attend at least one of three preseason on-course trainings. Aaron keeps everyone on their toes with email exams and quizzes, with questions like: “The size of the green should be considered irrelevant in evaluating putting difficulty. True or False?”
The answer (true!) and much more can be found in the raters’ spiral-bound, the USGA Course Rating System Guide. Raters who master the text can advance to become Course Rating Captains. This comes with major responsibility: Captains set up and run the rates, so they have annual calibration training comprised of a written test, on-course test and classroom instruction. It also comes with major perks: Calibration this year was in Las Vegas!
There are plenty of perks to go round for course raters. Uniforms, of course. Lunch compliments of the CGA. Free golf – often at exclusive private courses. And even road trips – for example, in September, there’s a five-course jaunt to Steamboat.
“Raters with backgrounds in engineering do really well,” says Deb Bolke, the retired police officer. “Where there are dogleg cuts, they figure the distances out in their heads and it blows my mind. Anybody can do this, but there are courses that are not easy.”
If you’ve ever noticed that the 85 you shot on Saturday brought your handicap index down and the 85 you shot at a different course on Sunday brought it back up again, you’ve got the concept: Rating tees for difficulty helps recreational players figure out where to play and how to pick the right set of tees at a course that’s new to them. It also keeps their handicap from fluctuating wildly when they have a low score on an easy course or a high score on a hard one.
This is complicated stuff! The raters are assigned a tee and gender(s) and then split into front-nine and back-nine teams to assign values to each hole’s topography, fairways, green target, recoverability and rough – there it is, the R&R – and much more. A 1 or 2 value means no problem; a 7 or 8 means you’ll have to be careful. (FYI, the male scratch drive is 269 yards, bogey drive 215 yards, and the female scratch drive is 226 yards, bogey 150 yards.)
Built into all this is a USGA-automated value for one more factor, “psychological.” That’s pretty much about how scared we are by all those rated factors and why men fear Pete Dye courses but women embrace them knowing that Alice Dye handled the forward tees.
“I play a lot of Pete Dye courses, and I never liked them until I understood what he was trying to do,” says veteran rater Larry Fleck. “Do this long enough, and you start looking at golf courses with a different perspective altogether.”
Following the raters around for just a day on such a familiar course gives me a different perspective too. Deb asks, “Is any of this making sense yet?” I answer, “A little. How long did it take you?” She laughs and says, “Years!”
CommonGround, the raters tell me, is unusual for a Colorado rate. It’s pretty flat, with wide fairways and few trees. Aaron’s co-captain, Chris Hasenzahl, gives me a stimpmeter demonstration on one green and says they’re rolling at about an 11, with generally flat and moderate undulation.
But at No. 8, the raters are stumped by a large mound covered in tall grass, right there in the fairway where their prototype players might try to land their drives. “These no-mow areas save money,” Chris says. “It’s become a trend the last five years.”
Out come the spiral-bound guides as the crew tries to determine how to categorize the feature. It doesn’t fall under topography as a mound, they decide, but a lateral extreme.
Aaron’s back nine crew, he says, spent a lot of time on severely uphill No. 18 debating the value of the elevation change from tee to green.
“The rate was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be,” he says at the end. “There was a lot of discussion out there.”
Aaron and Chris headed back onto the course for a little drive after their free lunch, checking and questioning the numbers produced by their counterpart’s team. They would then produce a spreadsheet for comparison of the rate eight years ago to the new rate and consult with the CGA’s course rating committee and course officials before the new numbers were confirmed.
“None of the holes changed significantly since the last rate,” says Aaron. “The one big change was the addition of the purple, more forward tees.”
Unless a course requests otherwise, he says, new ratings aren’t published until Jan. 1. The existing Black, Gold, White and Red tee ratings and slopes are changing so slightly, CommonGround will continue to use them through the 2023 season.
But there’s a new option designed for short hitters, at 4,795 yards, and thanks to the CGA ratings team’s quick work, players can already post.
Purple: 61.8 rating, 100 slope for men; 66.2 rating, 115 slope for women.
Veteran journalist Susan Fornoff has written about golf for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, ColoradoBiz magazine and her own GottaGoGolf.com. She became a CGA member when she moved from Oakland, CA, to Littleton in 2016, and ghost-writes as “Molly McMulligan,” the CGA’s on-course consultant on golf for fun. Email her at mollymcmulligan@gmail.com.
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