Course ssa ratings?

[Cwalk540]

Does anyone have info on how to find the pdga ssa rating of a course? Specifically the Farrugut state Park courses in North Idaho? I've been searching the Web all afternoon with no results....

 

[DavidSauls]

You can't. Courses don't have fixed SSA ratings. They're calculated for each round.

The best you can do is find a tournament that was held there, and look at the results. That will go with the assumption that the tournament layout was the same as the everyday layout---no extra holes, extra O.B., etc.

A few years back, you could get a list of SSAs for all tournament rounds on a given course, which was sometimes instructive, sometimes not. But the PDGA no longer makes that information available, in that fashion.

 

[Cwalk540]

Thanks for the input. That's a great descriprion of what I've found out. I'm trying to find a way to standardize it. I realize there are so many options that influence ratings that is is extremely difficult to achieve.

It seems that dgcr's SSE is a pretty good system .....

 

[DavidSauls]

Some courses don't change much, and use the same layout and rules for casual play and tournament play. Their SSAs are fairly consistent from round to round, so if you average them from a few tournaments, you have a usable number. At our course, we're no longer running singles tournaments but when we did, SSAs tended to be within 1 stroke, almost every round, except when we changed the course. So much that I'll quote you an approximate round rating for your casual round score.

For the other 2 courses I play most, one inserts 2 extra holes for tournaments, and ropes O.B. some areas that are inbounds the rest of the year. The other has baskets that move around to different pin placements, and 27 holes used in an assortment of 18-hole layouts from round to round in a tournament. SSAs on these courses can't be applied to them for general play.

 

[kevdiv48]

Thanks for the input. That's a great descriprion of what I've found out. I'm trying to find a way to standardize it. I realize there are so many options that influence ratings that is is extremely difficult to achieve.

It seems that dgcr's SSE is a pretty good system .....

It's a good rule of thumb, but you're best but will be to compare the DGCR SSE with actual PDGA round results. Some of the Houston area courses (example) even have an example SSA in the course description.

 

[ERicJ]

It's a good rule of thumb, but you're best but will be to compare the DGCR SSE with actual PDGA round results. Some of the Houston area courses (example) even have an example SSA in the course description.

Yeah, I used to be pretty good about updating the descriptions after we had tournaments. But a lot of the local tourneys started adding temp holes which means their SSA's aren't applicable to everyday play.