I played at Chris Cupit's Rivermont today, and they have a pace of play policy that I had never seen before; after having it explained to me, I wonder why more clubs don't do it this way. (Hopefully, Chris will see this and correct what I'm sure will be mistakes that make explaining it.)
There are clocks on the course approx. every 4 holes. The cool thing is, though, that they are set to pace of play standards, rather than the correct time of day. Consequently, if my group tees off at 9:00 a.m., if we are on pace, every clock that we come to during the round will say 9:00 a.m. throughout the round; if it says 9:20, we are behind pace, and KNOW that we have to pick it up or be asked to skip a hole. Conversely, if we teed off at 9:00 and the clock on the 14th green says 8:45 when we are putting out, we are ahead of pace!
I see several HUGE advantages to this:
1. Most obviously, all doubt is removed about whether or not we are keeping pace. No bickering among the group as to whether or not we are playing fast enough or not, or whose fault it is; we are either on pace or we are not.
2. Pressure is taken off the marshals; subjectivity is eliminated. The clock is the "bad guy" instead.
3. The membership becomes more and more aware of pace of play, and that alone would eliminated most of the problems.
Several additional caveats:
The club adheres strictly to 10 min. tee times, 9 min. on Sat., in order to properly space out groups.
If a group comes in over the pace of play limit (4 hrs., 13 min., I think...) AND are more than 15 min. behind the group ahead of them, they lose the right to an early tee time the next weekend!
Finally, management makes sure that the early groups know that they are expected to play BELOW the max of 4:13. The result is that they not only tend to do so, but want to know how much below pace they were when they get in.
Very cool stuff, to which I see no downside.