Getting Handicap Racing On Par
Getting Handicap Racing On Par
Handicapping our boats is a start, but wouldn’t it be better if we could handicap ourselves, too? What works for golf could work for sailing. Gaining Bearing from our November/December 2012 issue.
Handicap racing needs a jolt. We’ve got systems like ORR and IRC and even the new High Performance Rule, which rate the boats, but when boats are rated by complex formulas that can be exploited by clever designers, an arms race is unavoidable. New sails, pro crew, and constant tweaking of the boats will always serve as a way to gain an advantage. It can be fun for those with deep pockets and the people they employ, but frustrating for those who can’t afford to play such a high level. And then we have PHRF, which tries to equalize all shapes and sizes of boats, allowing them to race against each other fairly in all sorts of conditions.
It’s time to take handicapping a step forward, and PHRF is the perfect rule to tweak and revolutionize. It’s time to consider handicapping the sailors. Where I sail on Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay there’s a lot of racing happening at the local level, but I’m amazed to see the overall numbers are down quite a bit, and that many of the teams doing the racing are the same programs I saw 25 years ago. There’s little growth and even fewer new faces. It’s great to see the longevity of sailors and their passion for local events, but there’s cronyism in the clubs. The same people routinely win the trophies.
Hence my epiphany—and it didn’t even happen on the water. It happened on the golf course. The handicap system in golf is simple. Every time you play a legitimate round of golf you put your score into golf’s national handicapping system, called Golf Handicap and Information Network, which is a part of the United States Golf Association (golf’s equivalent to US Sailing). The score is placed in your list of the last 20 rounds played, and not only is the score saved, but each golf course has a rating as well. For example, an 80 on a difficult course carries more weight than an 80 on an easy course. Each round helps determine your overall “handicap,” and that handicap is an average amount of shots “over par,” based on the top-10 scores you’ve had from the last 20 rounds played.
In August, I played in a three-day tournament. It was match play with twosomes, including handicap, which in layman’s terms means that my friend and I were a team, and we played in a ladder format against the next pair that we met in the ladder, either in the winner’s bracket or the loser’s bracket, all including our “handicaps.”
