"TEPaul,
Years ago, I saw a study that indicated that 10 minute intervals worked best."
Patrick:
They do and there's nothing anyone on here can do with multiplication and theoretical math to change that.
The point is 7 minute intervals are not going to get players around a golf course faster. All 7 minute intervals do is force them to wait more and more often than 10 minute intervals.
We do this all the time and it's just a reality.
It's not that we don't get behind on the pacing grid---we do, and it generally happens for fairly obvious reasons and is generally inevitable as the day wears on.
We have what we call an "and" policy with our pace of play. That means a group has to be both behind on the clock AND out of position to get warned, timed or penalized.
The real deal is to just keep all the groups in position.
This new pace of play policy that the USGA is now using in their national amateurs is something else altogether. It takes a ton of man power too. The idea of it is to get fellow competitors to police one another with pace of play.
Frankly, in a philosophical sense, I don't think I agree with it either.
It's each player's responsibility to himself to conform to Rule 6-7. And it's our job to see that they do that individually.
I don't really like the idea of making fellow competitors do some other player's job or our job of officiating (pacing). Individual golfers in stroke play competition have enough to think about without having to get into that, in my opinion.