Really?
Our club removes the whites and regularly shifts the yellows and reds and installs mats on par 3's to protect tees and allow them to recover for the new year competition season.
Also, you have to inform the Pro you will play a handicap "qualifying" round to submit a card.
They note that before the round and you then have to submit it to ensure that rubbish scores aren't simply discarded.
If you don't return it it counts as a DQ in a qualifier.
In our club we have many mid range handicappers who submit just the minimum required cards per year, played with mates, at no extra charge, to sustain their handicap and the many high handicappers, such as me, who enter a card per comp per week, £5 a time off the whites and are totally regulated.
We then get stick in casual games about being bandits if we play well.
All part of the game 😎

What you need to do is lock the swing that hits it 130 in your memory bank.

Think about why it felt different to the shots that only go 50 yards. Do they have the trajectory, do the 50 yard shots go higher? I suspect they might. Think of your weight as well, think of how it may differ as the top of your follow through and work of replicating what works best.

My course only allows the whites for medal's and tie's, same with my previous one.

The last time I played the Open course at Turnberry the starter asked our handicaps, upon saying he said we could play off the medal tees which was nice. I don't think they let anyone play off the Championship tees outwith big competitions though.

Yes. All three colours will always be available. They do of course move them around to even out the wear but mostly that just means moving the markers back or forward a couple of yards. The reds and whites have separate teeing areas on several holes but it's mostly only the reds that consistently use a separate area. It seems random as to which of the dedicated white platforms are actually in use and I don't think it's ever all of them.

Maybe they feel that if the whites always used their own platforms the course length would be wrong.

Over winter they will make us use rubber mats on a couple of holes. I think I've said before that I don't like them. They are just typical driving range mats and it's not long before the rubber tee has been destroyed and you're left hitting directly off the mat

Ours is also the only course in the area that uses temporary greens when it's frosty. It's a bit annoying and a lot of players don't even bother putting out when they are in use. But that may be why we are generally reckoned to have the best kept greens in the area

As for handicaps you don't have to notify anyone beforehand. You just play off the whites and get your card signed and hand it in. So it sounds like at least in some respects getting a handicap at my club is a bit easier than elsewhere

When I had to play for a handicap again after I resumed playing I had to return 3 cards. Two were to be off the boxes and you could play with any member at any time. The other had to be off the white's in a medal.

I didn't hand my card in after my first round off the boxes.

my old course it was three cards in medal rounds and had to be in competitions but as we had a competition basically every saturday between april and october as well as a monthly medal on the first saturday of the winter months and a midweek medal on the first wednesday every month, it wasn't really a problem to get your cards done

Well, yes to get the handicap you need to enter three cards but none of them have to be from official competitions. They just have to be from a round played off the white tees and signed by someone who already has a handicap.
Ah well that is another issue. Handicaps at our club are frozen from 1st October to 1st April. So there's nothing I can do now anyway.

obviously it was alot harder during the winter especially as depending on the weather you might be playing to winter greens and using winter tees

we had a very active winter schedule tho at weekends

there was a saturday league and sunday league where you just turned up, paid an entry and all the names went into a hat to draw your pairings for a series of fourball matches. the saturday league the matchplay element was just for fun but everyone did a card and your lowest 12 scores over the winter counted to the league. the sunday league was pure matchplay and you got 2 points for a win and 1 for a draw, and you could have a maximum of 20 matches over the winter.

we also had a pretty serious county team event where you had 8 man teams for both a scratch league and a handicap league and you played all the other clubs in the county. for alot of people just getting into the winter league team was a big deal.

We have a couple of comps, roll-ups during the week and the winter league. The club stays open and active. It's just that they don't update anyone's handicap while winter rules are in place.

I want to find somewhere next year that I can start playing in competitions. I'm a bit limited at the moment with my playing partners as one of them works a lot of weekends and the other's girlfriend works shift so he makes a point of spending time with her if she's has a free weekend.

Another random question - what is your closest golf course like?

Mine is a bit odd: it's basically one step up from a 'park course' in that it's a full distance 18 holes and a reasonable challenge but also poorly looked after. If they had sensible prices it wouldn't be a bad place to practice but at £27 a round all weekend it's more than what the better courses around me charge (outside the peak morning period).

The only good thing is that because it overcharges the course is always very quiet - it's the only place I know that you can turn up at 9:30 on a saturday morning without a booking and be pretty certain that you'll be able to jump straight on. Similarly, it's good for a solo practice rounds as there's rarely anyone in front or behind of you so you can retake shots if you want. Also it's less than a mile from my door and has quite a nice little club house. Just a shame it's not nicer/cheaper.

Mine is my club. It's about six miles from my house but almost half way between my work and my house. So in the evenings I just have to turn left at one roundabout instead of right and I can be on the tee by twenty past five

It's a parkland course with mostly tree lined fairways. It's full length but on the shorter size (only just over 6,000 yds from the whites). It's well looked after. The greens are generally thought to be the best kept in the area. It was the only course around Banbury that kept all 18 holes open throughout last winter. Despite that there was no lasting damage and the course has played well all year.

I think it's one of the easier courses around here but I've been told that for longer hitter it's actually quite tricky because a lot of holes are a bit too short for them and wayward shots can get into trouble in the trees or OOB. In any case I play it in the evenings after work and I don't really want a challenge. For that I can go to our sister course for no charge :-/

Blueisthecolour, your local sounds like our Banbury Golf Club course. It's a lovely course plagued by drainage issues (partly built on a flood plain) and owners that just aren't quite putting enough money in. Last I heard it only had one green keeper!

The fairways often have a lot of weeds in them and the greens develop bare patches and even holes occasionally - rabbits I assume but they don't get repaired very quickly.

Yeah, to be fair to them I think that my local also suffers from a lack of natural drainage. The fairways are pretty poor even during summer. I took some pictures of the greens in March just to highlight how bad they were:

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It's just a shame because it's so convenient - I could literally carry my clubs there and back from my home if I could be bothered.

Oh they are bad. Banbury Golf Centre has never been quite quite that bad. Not got any pictures of greens at my club. The nearest I have is this that I took a week or so ago. It's the approach to my favourite hole. The only issues we have at the moment are the bumpiness after the tining but that will pass.

That looks a lot like the course not too far down from me - Bishopswood, outside Aldermaston. It's a nice course, a bit tight but not too difficult. Fantastic club house and driving range. If it wasn't for the fact that it's only 9 holes I'd be more than happy to become a member there.

I don't mean this disrespectfully but that is open to abuse.
As I said earlier in our club you have to "give notice" before the round that you propose to submit a card - I think there's a nominal fee of £1/2 - and if you then fail to submit a card you are DQ'd.
This method is often used by players hanging on to handicaps they can't actually play to
but submit just three cards a year played with "colleagues".

Surely it only hurts the player if they try to 'fix' their handicap in this way?

Meh, I don't think it adds any more opportunity than there already is.

It'd be a pretty crap handicap committee that didn't notice what was going on. If you only hand in comp cards it doesn't matter. If you hand in a mixture it'll be fairly obvious if the comp cards are always so much better.

I was a member there with my daughter back at the turn of the century and I think it only had one greenkeeper then!!

Lovely course and friendly club. Three nines; red, yellow and blue, but blue was a bit rough and not used much.

My daughter was ladies club champion in 2003, when she was 13.

Happy days.

They only have two nines open now - at least for normal golf. They also do foot golf so they might have resurrected some of the old holes for that.

It's worth a visit but it's just not up to the quality of the other courses around here. And it's a shame because it is quite lovely.

Yesterday I played one of the courses at the club I was a member of back in 2011. I started off ok, 46 through 8, but then I feel apart a bit and finished with 118. I remember regularly scoring around 107-110 on that course in the past so i've gone backwards a bit since then.

I noticed that one of my local clubs is offering a course of six 30 minute lessons for £125 so I might take them up on that. I mean the lessons i had with the pro earlier in the year completely destroyed my game but then I think i spread them out too much. I'm sure there's certain things I've sorted out with the help of those lessons but other things that have gone wrong.

I played my home course on Sunday but it was a scruffy round. Finished with 96 which is okay I suppose for a damp and chilly course but it felt poor. I struggled to see a lot of my tee shots and my putting wasn't brilliant.

I've noticed this before though. There's something about bright winter days that seems to make it difficult for me to see my ball flight. I think it has a knock-on effect on my accuracy. I've known for a while that playing straight into the sun means trouble off the tee so I think it's more of the same. I had the same thing last month when I played the whites in that comp at Rye.

I'm just puzzled as to:

a) Why bright winter days wreck my game when bright summer days inspire me (low sun?)
b) Why firing into the sun should bother me when I take pains to look at the ball during my swing :-/

Whatever it is I'd expect better playing golf on a day like today. Cool, a bit damp and overcast.

My pro runs a seven day programme. Don't know what he charges these days but it's one lesson a week for seven days and is very effective.

I know exactly what you mean. As soon as we turned to play the longer holes into the sun both myself and my playing partner struggled. We're not the most accurate of hitters and the rough was bad enough that you'll lose it if you don't see exactly where it lands - so losing the ball almost every time we hit over 120 yards wasn't helpful. I think both of us lost 5-6 balls in those 4-5 holes. Actually I probably hit close to double figures in lost balls in general - the rough was just a killer.

I've stuck with most of the technique that I was taught this year but it still feels very 'unnatural'. I feel as though i'm thinking about my swing a lot rather than naturally just swinging. I used to be able to hit 7i through to SW with pretty good consistency but that's disappeared.

I forgot to mention that both myself and my partner lost a couple of balls just because of leaves. The green keepers have tidied up most of them but the trees haven't finished yet. On one hole a long furrow was full to a couple of centimetres and my partner managed to top a ball off the tee and send the ball straight along it. It looked quite impressive as the leaves flew up in a line but we never found the ball :-/

Some leaves cost me a stroke on our winter green at the par 3 4th. I'd been waiting all autumn to play it as we now have to either thread the ball between two tall trees with only a metre clearance or send the ball really high and hope to stop it on the green. I chose an alternative strategy and pushed mine badly although it got through the little blocking woodland which was a relief. I then tried to chip on from 40 yards. The ball flew to within two yards of the fringe, landed in some leaves and stopped dead

If you don't enter comps (as I do every week), but simply submit the minimum number of cards required, the committee have nothing to notice. We have a number of members (admittedly a minority) who cannot play to their handicap but who hang on to "historic" handicaps this way - presumably out of pride.
These guys play during the week in social "roll ups" but are never found playing in comps because the cards would more likely be worse.That way their handicaps never fluctuate.
I play socially with quite a few of them - there's no animosity, they're nice enough guys but usually the first to call high handicappers "bandits" if they lose to them.
Easy enough to handle - I just say "Enter a few comps" 👹

Surely it's just an issue for the individuals if they want to lie to themselves. An official lower handicap doesn't make you a 'better' player - it just makes it harder for you to compete against your peers.

As someone who is relatively new to golf it does seem to me that the golfing world needs to 'chill' a bit here and there.