Some of us only put in scores for our handicap if it’s a competition. Some of us submit a card every time we play. Others like to combine a mix of the two.
And then there is another group, who for whatever reason, do none of the above. Their handicaps are more like a historical document – an archive of shots that were hit and, in some cases, many years ago.
Before the World Handicap System came into being in Great Britain & Ireland, there was the spectre of ‘inactive handicaps’.
You had to put in at least three cards a year to maintain your mark. If you failed, your handicap would become inactive, and you would have to submit three new cards – as you did when you got it the first time – to reactivate it and play in competitions.
I was caught out once by this mechanism, and didn’t care for it too much at the time, but it did provide a relative recency to proceedings.
Now that has been removed, a score in someone’s last 20 can go back as far as the dawn of WHS. Yes, if someone’s last score differential in their record is in 2020, that still counts.
A Handicap Index, says a tutorial on Scottish Golf’s website, “is designed to represent your demonstrated ability”. The phrase ‘demonstrated ability’ is repeated twice more on the webpage.
I suppose my question is: demonstrated from when?
Is a score from half a decade ago representative of your ability now?
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Should we time-limit scores on someone’s WHS index?
It’s absolute nonsense that a score from so long ago can still count towards your best eight scoring differentials.
I know many clubs will have terms of competition in place to counter historical scores having an impact on their events.
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My own club demands three in the last 12 months to get into an individual competition and six cards in the same time frame to compete in pairs or team events.
But that still relies on clubs taking the initiative, and I wonder if this is something that could be addressed within the WHS directly.
Look at the way you first gain a handicap record. As that moves up to a full 20 scoring differentials, there are various levers in place that push you down or hold you up depending on what part of the journey you are on.
For example, if you only have three scores, the average will be taken from the single lowest scoring differential and an extra adjustment of -2 is applied.
If you have 9 to 11 scores, it’s the average of the lowest three. If you have 17 or 18, it’s the average of the lowest six.
I don’t think we want to get back into a place where handicaps are active and inactive, but I see no reason why scores of a certain age don’t drop off a record.
So, for the sake of argument, any scores over three years old disappear. If that means only seven scores remain, then any subsequent scores are subject to the same calculations as those for a new handicap index. In this case, it would be the average of the lowest two that would count.
If there are no scores in that time period, then players would need to submit another 54 holes of golf.
It’s not about whether people are playing in competitions, or whether they want to put in general play scores, it is that when they do play in a round which counts, their numbers are more representative of what they’re capable of relatively recently. Not what they did in another decade.
Now have your say
What do you think? Should there be a time limit on how long scores can stay on a WHS record? Would you go further than Steve, or is the idea that scores never die one of the advantages of the WHS record system? Let him know in the comments, or get in touch with us on X.
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