Making do

Yesterday I was in charge of the NCGA / CIF Boys High School Championship at Richmond Country Club.  Richmond is a good old course that hosted 4 PGA Tour events in the 1950s.  Players such as Sam Snead, Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan all played there.  Snead won it one year.

The course is in the middle of some major work to improve the drainage in their fairways.  Large herring-bone drainage systems are being installed, one hole at a time.  They finished the 5th hole a few weeks ago, while the par 4 6th was just finished last week.  But, even though 6 was done, it was not yet playable as their were still 1-2 foot wide ridges in the fairway where the drains were installed so they couldn’t mow it.  Fortunately they have a spare hole that is usually used for practice.  It is a 166-yard par 3 that is right next to the 18th hole.  Also, they were just starting work on the 9th hole and were in the process of tearing up the area directly in front of all the tees except the most forward one.  So, we went from a 510-yard par 5 9th to a 395-yard par 4.

These changes made the par for the course 70 instead of the usual 72.

It was an interesting challenge to get the scorecards done so that there was a minimum of confusion.  In the end, I had to edit the scorecards that come with the Tournament Pairing Program we use to show the holes as 1-5 and 7-19.  I kept the new hole as 19 because all the holes including that one had large stones with the hole numbers on them and I didn’t want to confuse a player whose card says 8 while the sign on the tee says 9.  But, by doing this, it meant the scorecard showed holes 1-5 and 7-10 on the left side and holes 11-19 on the right.  I was able to get TPP to grey the 10th hole so that the guys who started on 10 wrote the scores in the correct places.

On top of that, ties for the team event are usually broken the the 6th score, but if still tied they are broken using the USGA’s tie-breaker count backs (final 9 holes, final 6, final 3, and finally the last hole).  I didn’t want the 19th hole to be one of the tie-breakers so I had to write the rules to make sure that everyone understood that 10-18 would be the ones used.

All of this was somewhat difficult to work out and write up, but by knowing what was going on with the course ahead of time and making sure that the changes and the tie-breakers were well documented to the coaches, nobody could claim they didn’t understand it all.

In the end, we had a successful event and I look forward to going to the State Championships in two weeks.