Mannings Heath golfers handed new sort of challenge

In the meantime they can enjoy ‘virtual golf’ through weekly competitions devised by the club’s IT expert and fellow senior Graham Wyatt.

As well as providing his colleagues with fireside fun Graham hopes the competitions will give them practice in submitting their scores under the new World Handicap System (WHS) introduced at the end of 2020.

Under WHS, members can enter their score on the club computer system every time they play, even after social rounds, provided they pre-register and their score is checked. Their handicaps will be adjusted on a rolling basis by averaging the best eight of their last 20 scores.

Graham’s competitions challenge seniors to guess the gross scores one of them has been invited to submit for an imaginary round played on the Waterfall course. Whoever sets the target score for the week will give hints in advance on the quality of their golf and points will be awarded, hole by hole, for the accuracy of their predictions.

Members have to enter their scores using an app downloaded to their phone and with an optional but nominal entry fee there will be a small cash prize for each weekly winner.

Graham (above) played the first imaginary round and advised that, though rusty, his score could have been ‘quite good’ but for finding water trouble and a couple of bunkers. He had also putted well.

He revealed subsequently his fictitious 18 holes had yielded a nett 75 for 34 Stableford points.

Derek Hendry guessed the scores on six of Graham’s holes and was close enough on others to win with 148 points out of a possible 180.

Seniors’ captain Richard Lotinga will dreaming up the next mystery round so Heath’s seniors can gain further practice in the new procedures for posting their scores when real competitions return.