Golf Cheats and Sandbaggers

The USGA implementation of its handicap system makes cheating easy. Enter your own score. Puff, you're done. Who's looking over your shoulder - no one. When is the last time a handicap oversight committee bagged someone. Oh it happens - about once in a blue moon.

The new systems that are available offer some good checks and balances, like having to enter a score for every hole. Hey, you want a handicap you will use to compete against other golfers for money and glory, then what's an extra minute to enter a score for each hole. By entering a score for each hole you can also learn something about your game. Some systems have analysis tools that will let you look at trends and more. It's called game management and can help anyone become a better golfer. These systems also automatically make the adjustments, so your true score remains. Sophisticated algorithms can catch cheats that no oversight committee will ever find.

These systems also allow you to track more information, like number of putts, drives in fairway and more if you so chose. This may seem like a lot of work, but there are even tools to make that easier. At least one product from New Level Golf allows you to print out a custom score card for over 30,000 courses. And it's easy to add a new course. These cards have places to record things like putts and they can even be read by an HP scanner so all the work of entering a score is almost non-existent.

Tomorrow I'll look at what's in it for pros and pro shops.