[David Davis]

Last weekend the National (Amateur) Strokeplay Championships were held at my home course. De Noordwijkse. The 100 best players in the country were to do battle over 4 rounds. Thursday the conditions were perfect, next to no wind, warm and sunny. Friday morning there was a mild storm that passed through, winds reached windforce 7 with some higher gusts. The day was postponed and at 10:30 am when the wind went down to the normal average of windforce 5 it was too late to finish the day so they cancelled it all together. A side note is that any club medal would of proceeded in windforce 6-9 and always does but for some reason this was too much for the best players in the country. They were worried about balls rolling off the greens.

The course was not tricked up at all. The greens were rolling at what the National Golf Federation Claims to be 11. However, I was there and wouldn't give them more than 9. 11 on a links course is ridiculously quick. (any thoughts here?)

The cut was made based on the first days play. Saturday they played the last 36 holes as planned in very very low winds for our course, force 1 in the morning and perhaps force 4 by end of the day.

(please realize these are the best in the country and the cut-off to enter the event was HCP of about 1. The average HCP taking all 41 that made the cut was +.5

Now take a look at the scores and tell me what concusions can be drawn in your opinion about this course if any?


1   Robin Kind            -4   212   69   70   73
2   Rutger Buschow   +3   219   72   74   73
3   Robbie van West   +7   223   73   70   80
4   David van den    +9   225   76   73   76
5   Philip Bootsma   +12   228   71   78   79
6   Gerard Geelker   +13   229   75   83   71
7   Darius van Driel   +13   229   77   76   76
8   Giesbert Gom   +14   230   78   74   78
9   Gust Maes           +16   232   74   82   76
10   Tommy Terng   +18   234   74   83   77
11   Michael Kraaij   +18   234   78   77   79
12   Dennis Asselbergs   +19   235   81   79   75
13   Jelle Zaanen   +19   235   78   77   80
14   Gijs Doorn           +20   236   80   79   77
15   Menno van Dijk   +21   237   79   85   73
16   Stuart Baird           +21   237   75   85   77
17   Marc van Houdt   +21   237   77   79   81
18   Jan Ottink           +22   238   79   76   83
19   Martijn Broeren   +24   240   82   81   77
20   Gijs van Herwa   +24   240   81   82   77
21   Aaron van den    +24   240   82   79   79
22   Rody Haije           +24   240   81   80   79
23   Kevin Reints   +24   240   76   81   83
24   Berend den Eng   +26   242   80   86   76
25   Iskander Woldi   +26   242   82   81   79
26   Vince van Veen   +26   242   81   82   79
27   Simon Simonse   +26   242   77   83   82
28   Axel Geers           +27   243   80   82   81
29   Maarten Bosch   +27   243   76   83   84
30   Job Albertus   +30   246   82   82   82
31   Caspar Kipp           +30   246   79   85   82
32   Sem Westdijk   +31   247   82   82   83
33   Timo Riensema   +31   247   79   82   86
34   Jim de Heij           +35   251   79   91   81
35   Alexander Hem   +35   251   82   81   88
36   Lars Keunen   +36   252   80   90   82
37   Marcel Roelofsma   +36   252   78   83   91
38   Tim Talma           +44   260   82   94   84


The first column is there score in relation to par - 72. The second the total for the 3 days followed by the scores for each round.
- 5 guys played in their hcp buffer.
- In The Netherlands we use something called a CBA adjustment for tournament when the field doesn't play well. The CBA was -4 for all days which means it's a reduction only event. They did so bad that none of their hcp's will go up as a result of the poor performance. Only the few guys that played their hcp will go down plus they all receive an additional 4 shot buffer. So par for the event is 4 shots higher than par before the CR rating is counted in. So a scratch player gets 7 shots.

Any thoughts or conclusions?

[Joe_Tucholski]

The course must have been playing very hard (and the CBA for the course was not accurate given the conditions) or the Netherlands has some serious sand baggers.  It looks like you only provided the top 38 of the 100 so the next 62 players would make it even more unlikely to see the scores provided given the handicaps and the course CBA (I assume the CBA is similar to using slope to determine a course handicap).

As far as the daily scores related to each other they seem to make sense based on the weather you provided.

From the numbers the first day was the easiest.  The avg on the day was the lowest avg at 78.  The standard dev and variance were the lowest on the first day.  The lowest overall score occurred on the first day and the highest score on the first day was the lowest high score of a day.

The second day looks like the toughest with some people having to play in the more difficult wind.  The avg was the highest at nearly 81.  The highest score occurred on this day.  The standard deviation and the variance are highest on this day.

The third day was kind of between the two.

[David Davis]

Hi Joel,

Actually there are 3 rounds there played over two days. They were supposed to play 18 Thursday and Friday and 36 on Saturday. Friday there was too much wind although all us links course players know that windforce 5-7 are easily playable still although challenging.

The CBA indicates the Course Rating for the days would of been 78.9 for scratch players. Given the field was better than scratch on average. The conditions were not tough, in fact the easiest I've seen at our course all summer, ie the least wind and best weather.

The reason I only provided 38 is because only 41 made the cut. The rest all had considerably higher scores, many rounds above 90 and I don't think it's fair to publicly embarrass these guys ha ha...(I'm kidding) I just only have 1 round of data for the guys that didn't make the cut and the scores were very very bad.

I'm not sure I understand why you would jokingly say something about the sandbaggers. Wouldn't sandbagger to you indicate they have much higher hcps than they play? In this case these guys all have much lower hcps than they played on our course.

[Joe Bausch]

So in the Netherlands you have many golfers with vanity handicaps too?!

 

[Joe_Tucholski]

Hi Joel,

Actually there are 3 rounds there played over two days. They were supposed to play 18 Thursday and Friday and 36 on Saturday. Friday there was too much wind although all us links course players know that windforce 5-7 are easily playable still although challenging.

The CBA indicates the Course Rating for the days would of been 78.9 for scratch players. Given the field was better than scratch on average. The conditions were not tough, in fact the easiest I've seen at our course all summer, ie the least wind and best weather.

The reason I only provided 38 is because only 41 made the cut. The rest all had considerably higher scores, many rounds above 90 and I don't think it's fair to publicly embarrass these guys ha ha...(I'm kidding) I just only have 1 round of data for the guys that didn't make the cut and the scores were very very bad.

I'm not sure I understand why you would jokingly say something about the sandbaggers. Wouldn't sandbagger to you indicate they have much higher hcps than they play? In this case these guys all have much lower hcps than they played on our course.

Sorry missed the bit about getting 7 shots for a CBA of 4.  Not really understanding the CBA.

What conclusions were you thinking people would come up with?

[jvisser]

Hi David,

You know I have to respond to this. I'm very interested in what others think, but have to make a few notes:
- the wind was 8-9 Beaufort on Friday morning and by 13:30 balls were still roling of the greens, so the decision
not to play on Friday was a good one.
- The CBA was -4, -4 and -3 for the three rounds respectively.
- I was on the bag all Saturday and the greens were definitely very quick 9 - 10  I'd say. I don't think it was 11,
althought the person measuring the speed is usually not far off.

I do agree that the scores brought in are rediculously high for the level of handicaps of the field.
In my opinion this is due to the fact that they are not used to such an undulating links course.
They can't deal with the wind well and are used to flatter courses, where you nearly always have
a level stance and if you just miss the green, your ball will lie just off the green, while on Noordwijk
it can be 20 or more yards away.
In addition, they in general don't take their medicine when they end up in the deep rough.
They'll try to make good distance or even go for the green instead of just chopping out to
the fairway. This compounds errors and lead to some serious numbers.

Anyway, just some notes and my view on things, curious to see what others think.

[Mark Pearce]

No surprise that the average scores for day 1 are lower, these are 38 of the 41 lowest scores of the day.  If th wind wasn't hat strong during rounds 2 and 3 was the set up particularly tricky?

And I agree, a stomp reading of 11 on agood links course is Mickey Mouse set up material and I don't believe it.  I'd be surprised if the Open greens re really ever much more than 10.

[David Davis]

Mark, I'm absolutely with you on the stimp reading. I think they mistakenly tested it on a steep downhill slope assuming it was flat. I'd give them 9 and a little from what I saw arriving at 11 am.

Jan, I was not there Friday but my weatherman lives next door and as I was hoping to come out and watch our friends I was following the conditions moment to moment, but I heard a much different story about the wind on Friday towards the end of the morning. Although it doesn't matter as that has no effect on the scores that I posted or any conclusions that can be made/not made due to the fact that no golf was played in high winds.

In any case, we can certainly agree that Saturday afternoon when the wind had picked up it was still well below our average wind and still perfect conditions for Noordwijk don't you think? Sure more difficult than the other rounds where there was no wind at all. Which is also rather unrealistic for us.

[Tom_Doak]

I can draw one firm conclusion from the information given.

Robin Kind must be one hell of a player.

The rest of the guys, I'm not sure about.

[David Davis]

Tom, ur right he is for this little country. Him and a young guy named Dan Huizinga are the two best in the country. Perhaps even if you take the tour pros into consideration although i don't know that for a fact yet.

I honestly thought that all these guys with +2 and +3 handicaps would play well on our course in these perfect conditions. Again I was wrong. But you can bet I was praying for some high winds as I wanted to see Kind face a real challenge. We'll see how he fairs at the KLM Open this week.

[Jason Topp]

I have never heard the term wind force before.  Could you explain it to me?

[Sam Morrow]

Maybe those guys should practice more.

[Scott Warren]

Jason,

I believe "force #" as mentioned refers to the Beaufort Scale.

[David Davis]

Scott, thanks for clarifying. My apologies to everyone for assuming this was universally used if it's not. I don't know any other way of saying it and if I want to use mph or km/h then I need to look up the scale as Scott provided. The windforce I can pretty much guess by feel.

What I can tell you is that our average wind for the entire year is 4.8 (or basically 5), which is a wind blowing at 17-18 mph or 28-29 km/h. I imagine this type of wind is probably not uncommon for a lot of UK and Irish links as well. That's why when you go out as a guest and you've been lucky enough to get a low wind day, say 2 club wind when it's in your face all the locals would say it's nothing, not even the average. :-)

For our club matches it really needs to be a full on storm before they cancel the match. I've competed in 8-9 on the scale several times. Mind you the 9 are gusts in most cases. The highest we've been out in is 10. It gets humorous when the balls get blown uphill and your putter become the longest club in the bag.

These top players played 80% of their match in 3 or below which is clearly far below our average wind and those type of days in the year you can normally count on a couple hands. Add sun to that and perhaps you can count them on 1 hand. So yes they had perfect conditions. Maybe not for San Diego or the Monterey Peninsula but certainly for Noordwijk.

[David Davis]

Oh one more for the record here. The winner Kind, placed 25th in the KLM Open - NL European Tour event last year. So I could based on results of at least one of the events he's entered make an argument that he's indeed head and shoulders above the rest of the guys and might even be able to compete someday with the top hundred European Tour guys. Since he will most likely go pro or attempt to soon.

[Rich Goodale]

Tom D is right.  Kind is a stud and so is the non-entrant Daan Huizing (http://www.standrews.org.uk/News/Latest-News/Dutchman-Huizing-lifts-the-2012-St-Andrews-Links-T.aspx).  90% of the rest of the field should take more lessons from their local pro....

[David Davis]

Rich, indeed Daan is a great amateur, current hcp is +7 due to the great tournament in the UK, very impressed by what he did on the links courses over there. Especially since he doesn't have a huge amount of links course experience and to go up against great amateurs that grew up on links courses and destroy the field is impressive. I'm sorry he wasn't at NGC for the above tournament. Although I watched him play at the National Open at De Pan two weeks ago and wasn't that impressed as he was not firing on all cylinders when I was there.

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