The quest for an online handicap tracker (part 1)

September 15, 11:19 PMSF Golf ExaminerGreg Quiroga

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A great place to play a game of liar's dice after a
round. A bit far to drive just to enter a score, though

When I started really playing golf in earnest a few years ago, I decided I needed to start tracking my handicap. I wasn't sure how to go about it, and consulted some of my golf buddies. They encouraged me to join a local club, where I could enter my scores after rounds and establish a handicap.

That was a bit too intimidating for a beginner, and seemed like a bit of a pain, to boot. I seldom play the same course twice in a row, and the thought of having to go somewhere after a round to enter my score seemed silly. I'm also not very good at deferred gratification. If I've shot a round, I want to geek on it. I needed something electronic, preferably on the Internet.

I did an online search, and settled on Yahoo!'s online handicap tracker. Yahoo! offers the ability to enter results for any course. They have a pretty complete database of courses, but if your course isn't in it you can enter your own course: all you need is the par, rating and slope. Combined with the allure of complete anonymity, and Yahoo!'s price of $0.00, I signed up immediately.

Yahoo! also offers the ability to enter scores hole-by-hole and track a wide variety of statistics. I immediately customized my scorecard and began tracking fairways hit, greens in regulation, ups and downs, and putts per hole.

All that data is hand-entered, and completely stagnant.
About as useless as my so-called scoring irons

I diligently entered all of the data from each round I played, and early on I enjoyed simply establishing a handicap and striving to work it downwards. Somewhere along the way, however, I started craving a more intelligent system. I got tired of having to enter the par for each and every hole, along with my scores, over and over for every course I played. I can, for better or worse, rattle off the hole# and par for all of the courses on my short-list of regular haunts.

More than anything, I started craving interactivity with my data. I started wanting to know the answers to questions about my performance. How often do I follow a par with a double-bogey? How many greens in regulation do I hit on average? How does being in the fairway relate to making par?

I suppose I could go back through all of the rounds I've entered into Yahoo!'s system and crunch the data myself. Build some massive spreadsheet, and just keep adding new tabs for each new round. But I'm a firm believer in not reinventing the wheel, especially when making wheels is not my strong point.

I once again asked my closest golf-geek buddies, and once again got nowhere. "I've built my own spreadsheet" was one reply, though he never actually sent it to me. "Join a club" came up again.

A quick check of google revealed that the market has changed in the past few years, thanks to two key events. In 2005 the USGA passed a rule stating that "Golfers will now be able to post all scores for handicap purposes via the Internet." This legitimzed the market for developers who wanted to create handicap tracking software, enabling them to offer "true" USGA handicaps and cards.

Data storage and bandwidth prices continue to plummet, making it possible to offer an incredibly well-rounded service at prices that were unheard of when I first started using Yahoo! For anywhere from $9.95 to $49.95 a year you can sign up with a handicap tracking service that offers extremely detailed reports, data crunching, comparisons among similarly skilled players, and a "true" USGA handicap.

I'm in the process of singing up with three of the services I liked best: MyScorecard, NetHandicap, and Golfing Record in order to evaluate them for my own personal use, and for this blog. I purposefully didn't choose any run or maintained by an existing golf entity, such as the Golf Channel, SI's Golf Magazine, or Golf Digest. And not for entirely altrustic reasons.

The Golf Channel's "Game Tracker Pro" never tells you how much it will cost, or what data you will get until you enter a credit card. I think Sports Illustrated has made Golf Magazine suck, and Golf Digest discontinued its free online handicap tracker without warning, dumping all of its users' data with a single click.

I'll report back in upcoming weeks on my findings. In the interim, if you have an online handicap tracking system you use, I'd love to hear about it.