Pack players in too tightly and the course will look like the M25. Space them out too much and you may feel like you’ll lose potential revenue. What’s the ideal? Here are The R&A’s recommendations.
“It is accepted as fact, by those who have studied pace of play and flow around the course, that overcrowding is the most common cause of longer than necessary rounds and unacceptable waiting times.”
So says The R&A’s Pace of Play Manual and anyone who has been out on a golf course when it’s packed to the rafters – and every hole somehow takes an eternity – wouldn’t argue.
The time it takes to play golf isn’t just a bugbear at the elite professional level. When round times get too long, club golfers get frustrated and tempers get frayed.
Who hasn’t had a complaint from a player, or a group, that has walked off the course mid-game because they said it was just taking too long?
We look to blame notoriously slow players, or caterpillar-crawling fourballs, but sometimes the real culprit set a traffic jam in motion before any players ever set foot on the course.
Managing starting intervals, particularly on a busy competition day, is a tricky exercise. Club committees want groups to get round in a timely fashion but they also want to maximise playing opportunities for their members. Again, if players can’t enter events because they’re always full then that also breeds discontent.
When it’s visiting golfers, parties and societies that are taking precedence, every minute not utilised feels like it is lost income.
But if the gaps between tee times are too short, too many golfers are going to be on the course at the same time. At that point, it doesn’t matter if you use rangers. It’s irrelevant whether pace of play checkpoints are in place.
You can let your greens grow a little longer. You can cut the rough back. People, though, just can’t speed up when they rammed in wall to wall.
“The message is clear,” says the aforementioned Pace of Play manual. “Starting intervals need to be sufficiently wide for there to be any chance of achieving good pace of play and flow around the course.”
What should those tee time gaps be? The wider the better, suggests the governing body but, of course, the ever-increasing number of players can limit what clubs can do.
“When play is in two-balls an interval of at least eight minutes is recommended,” states the manual. That goes up to at least 10 minutes when three-balls are going out and 11 and 12 minutes for fourballs.
“A good guide is that the starting interval should not be shorter than the time it should take to play the quickest hole on the course, and this becomes particularly relevant when that hole features early in the round.”
Of course, many club competitions may see a mix of group sizes. A tee sheet that caters for slots of fours might also see twoballs and threeballs among the foursomes.
When there is a mixture of sizes out on the course, it is recommended that the intervals cater for fourballs.
How many of your clubs are running competitions with four golfers in a single group and 12 minute starting intervals?
On the financial question – that having fewer groups reduces revenue and stunts the number of people who can play – “the reality is that reducing the amount of time it takes to play will mean that those starting later in the day will be guaranteed to complete their rounds and, consequently, additional times can be offered.”
What if you’re convinced that it’s golfers who are the ultimate culprits? Let’s say the rough is up, there are ball searches going on everywhere, and the course is just playing to its full difficulty.
In that case, if increasing starting intervals isn’t enough on its own to quicken round times, starting gaps might be the answer.
These are a feature of elite competitions, such as those staged by England Golf and other governing bodies both at the amateur and professional level, and leaves an empty time after a certain number of groups to create a gap.
Here’s an example from The R&A Pace of Play Manual. “If the starting intervals are 10 minutes and the Committee has an empty starting time after every 10th group, there will be a 10 minute break in play from the 1st tee every 90 minutes.
“If a delay has built up on a particularly tee early on in the round, the starter’s gap should enable that delay, or at least some of the delay, to clear. Without the empty starting interval, the likelihood is that waiting on that hole will increase as the day goes on.”
Two-tee starts, and shotgun starts, as well as simply restricting the number of players who can form one tee time, are also highlighted as other ways of getting more players on course and getting them around the layout in a prompt fashion.
Why is this so important? Faster play means happier golfers, who are more likely to remain at the club or, should they be visitors, to return for subsequent visits.
A course that is known to look like the M25 on a Friday afternoon is one some players are sure to avoid.
