How do you get a rating?

[LeftyToss]

So I've never played in a tournament before. My friend told me about this B Tier amateur tournament coming up at the end of May at Tyler and I've played there enough to be comfortable playing in my first tournament. When I went to the sight to sign up I saw that everyone signed up has a rating. How do I obtain one, or do I have to play in a few tournaments first?

 

[mmmatt]

You have to play in a few tournaments as a PDGA member.

 

[innova]

To obtain a PDGA rating you would need to be a current member and have enough events in the "rating system" for the PDGA to calculate your rating.

I forget what mine was... 980? Not sure, it has been years.

 

[12StonesScott]

To obtain a PDGA rating you would need to be a current member and have enough events in the "rating system" for the PDGA to calculate your rating.

Enough = 1. I've only played one PDGA-sanctioned event, nearly two years ago, and my puny 828 is still out there for everyone to see ;-)

 

[tamahawk]

I'm just learning about the whole SSA's and Ratings things, but if you want to get a general idea of what your rating would be, play in the tournament, and when the scores are posted, find a pdga member in the posted results (on the pdga website) who scored similar to what you scored, and that should get you a ballpark figure.

Be careful with this though, from what I understand, the ratings are totally dependant on course layout, the tees you played, etc. So if you are comparing others scores, make sure that they played at the same level as you, or at least the identical course layout. Any variance here would affect the rating. Maybe some others who are more familiar with this can verify!

 

[80playedin10states]

good call tamahawk..you can get an idea of the same tourney but from the year(s) before to get a general idea...does that make sense? just go to pdga.com and go under tour/schedule..

 

[tamahawk]

Thanks 80playedin10states!

I guess the ratings are all based off of the SSA (Scratch Scoring Avg). So you can look at tournaments from the past, but you will probably see some variance. Like I said, I'm still trying to figure this rating thing out too, but since it is based off of the SSA, even things like weather conditions (rain, high winds, etc.) can have an impact on the SSA, and therefore the ratings.

Here is a link on the pdga site that you can enter the course name, and it will give you links to all the SSA's for the course based on all sanctioned tournaments held at that course.

http://www.pdga.com/course-ratings-by-course

Just click on one of the tournament links, and it will list all scores and ratings for each of the events for that course.