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The World Handicap System officially launched in the United States and several other countries with the start of the new year. Below, USGA managing director of handicapping and course rating Steve Edmondson and USGA managing director of GHIN and IT Gareth Londt give some additional insight to this new era in handicapping.
Launching something like this worldwide is quite a challenge, which is why we chose to go in waves instead of everywhere all at once. So far, the countries where the WHS is live are the United States, Argentina, Bahamas, Bermuda, Bolivia, Botswana, Canada, DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Eswatini, Guam, Hong Kong, India, Republic of Korea, Lesotho, Malawi, Mexico, Mozambique, Namibia, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Tanzania, Uruguay, Venezuela, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The next planned wave coming online will be Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, and Portugal. Other countries, including Great Britain and Ireland, go live throughout 2020.
While there were a few minor technology hiccups – which is to be expected with a rollout of this size and scope – we didn’t get many reports of extreme handicap movement. Since the new WHS is based on the old USGA system the vast majority of indexes should not have moved more than a few tenths of a point in either direction.
While the formula has changed and there are new features like the Playing Conditions Calculation, players should rest easy, as the new system is quite sophisticated. We hope golfers will get out there, have fun, input their scores, and let the system do all the calculations. If other questions arise, we’ve created a lot of great resources at usga.org/whs.
This is actually very exciting. As more and more scores are entered into the same system, we’ll have access to all sorts of “big data” advantages that would either take far more manpower or just weren’t possible previously.
The short answer is yes. We anticipated there would be some hiccups and we planned for many of them. However, some were unforeseen. But we're really proud of how our entire team has stepped up, and the majority of issues have been completely resolved.
Golfers don’t need to do anything drastically different, other than entering their scores in maybe a more timely manner. Now, there’s the added bonus of seeing your new handicap the very next day.
USGA