What's your course Foliage Factor?

[Chutney]

I'm sure most of you are familiar with this chart for calculating the Foliage Factor (FF) for a course

Foliage Range
Pinball 218 234
Tighter 235 251
Corridor 252 264
Woodsy 265 277
Average 278 292
Stands 293 307
Scattered 308 324
Isolated 325 354
None 355 385

Distance/FF + 30 = estimated SSA


Using the SSA of two sanctioned events held at this course (same layout both years) I came up with Foliage Factors of 245 and 257 using

Distance/(Actual SSA-30)=FF

Neither day was especially windy or had any rain, so it surprised me that the FF came out in the tighter/corridor range. I consider the course to be moderately to lightly wooded. Also, even though there is a variety of uphills and downhills, the net elevation of the layout comes out to be -15' over 18 holes, so there isn't just a bunch of uphill slogs that would affect the numbers.

A winter league event was held here this past weekend. I did an armchair calculation of the SSA from the rated players and came up with an SSA of around 57.3 for a 6400' layout. A 235-ish FF

Maybe the cold weather contributed 1-2 strokes, but even taking that into account it still comes out to be in the 250's. For this style of course I'm quite surprised.

There's OB on a few holes but only 1 or 2 OBs really come into play for most players. A few of the holes have tight gaps early or late but nothing that I consider unreasonable. Further investigation is needed :\


Back to the point... what's the FF at your course? And what are the contributing factors?

 

[DavidSauls]

255 in the toughest layout.

But I'm not sure how much faith to put in that formula. This course has a wide range, from pretty open to quite tight, with many holes incorporating a combination of fairway widths. "Varied" would be the only description of foliage that would make sense. Beyond that, lots of O.B. probably skews the formula, at least in our case.

 

[Chutney]

These pics are almost 6 years old now... A lot of the brush is gone (and a few trees) so the gaps are more open, but you get the idea.

A few early gaps off the tee

Late gaps for approaches (orange baskets)

I think these contribute the most to the course playing at that FF or Challenge Factor or whatever you want to call it.

We only have 5 holes that I would consider fully wooded (but not as densely wooded compared to the Darkside or a NC course). Another two holes play through a power line lane (35-40' wide). A few others play through scattered mature trees. The others are a mix of open/wooded and vice versa

 

[hawk12]

I just ran this formula for a course I designed, and it came out to a 255 foliage density, which might be about right, as many holes are "tighter" or "Corridors", but there are 5 field holes with "Stands" or "scattered" trees.
Its a pretty dawn wooded course overall, and tough for many players.

This might be a decent rough estimate for the entire course to relate to other courses, but I find it to not be accurate on a per hole basis where a course has 11 wooded holes, 5 field holes, and 2 pond carry shots - I using Stafford Woods in Voorhees, NJ for this exercise, and SSA over 3 PDGA events to come up with the avg. SSA of 59.

 

[TylerBrown2]

This post fascinates me. Who knew this much science went into some courses. Seems like some I play were just thrown there but others I can really see how things like this were used to shape it.

 

[Chutney]

Tyler, to clarify, none of this is my original work. I am using formulas and ideas put forth by Chuck Kennedy.

I find it useful because we use a lot of mixed layouts at our course and it's nice to be able to reasonably estimate the SSA of whatever layout we are using. I agree with hawk12 that it's not useful for hole by hole estimates.

There was also a great idea in an old post by Tim Haynes (I think) about posting information at the start of the course about each layout and how different skill level players would likely score. It was something like: (making up numbers here)

On the short tees-short baskets course:

An expert player would average 45-47
An advanced player would average 50-52
An intermediate player would average 55-57
A recreational player would average 60-62

Something like that.

We could post this for both tees to both baskets combinations using the Distance/FF +30 formula and get fairly close to the actual numbers for normal conditions.