I hope that everyone had fun this season during the Tuesday League! Additionally, I hope that you were able to improve your golf game at a level commensurate with your physical abilities, time commitment, and desire to improve. The off-season is a great time to set goals for the next year and it can be helpful to have some benchmarks to compare against when setting these goals. With that in mind, here are some statistics from the Tuesday League for how we did as a group and as individuals (see the note at the end of this email for how this data was collected and calculated).
As a group, in our GHIN-postable non-team events (e.g., Field Days), we averaged 40.5 players with 33.7 players playing from the white tees, 3.1 players playing from the gold tees, and 3.7 players playing from the blue tees. As the year progressed, we had more players playing from gold and fewer playing from blue. Hopefully it is unsurprising that NET scores from the different tee sets were quite close (within a stroke of each other) (see the table below). Somewhat surprisingly, the GROSS scores were actually lower from the blue tees as compared to the white or gold tees. The reason for this is probably that a disproportionate number of our lower handicappers selected the blue tees.
| white | gold | blue | total | |
| avg number of players | 33.7 | 3.1 | 3.7 | 40.5 |
| avg net score | 76.9 | 77.5 | 77.2 | 77.0 |
| avg gross score | 90.5 | 91.9 | 87.0 | 90.3 |
Take-aways from the group data are that we (as a group) generally average around bogey golf (gross) with an average net score of about +7 over par. Additionally, the tee set can be selected to optimize fun since it doesn’t appear to have a big impact on net scores.
Moving on to individual statistics, our top-5 lowest (average) gross scorers were:
| Place | Player | avg gross | rounds |
| 1 | Dylan Fitzgerald | 78.5 | 28 |
| 2 | Nik Quesnell | 79.3 | 19 |
| 3 | Karl Meier | 79.8 | 29 |
| 4 | Justin Kim | 80.0 | 17 |
| 4 | Steve Brady | 80.0 | 6 |
Dylan managed to average the lowest gross score for the league while playing from the blue tees for most of his rounds! That’s amazing Dylan. Our top-5 lowest (average) net scorers were:
| Place | Player | avg net | rounds |
| 1 | Karl Meier | 73.0 | 29 |
| 1 | Dave Loy | 73.0 | 24 |
| 1 | Kurt Kiehn | 73.0 | 24 |
| 4 | Dylan Fitzgerald | 73.3 | 28 |
| 5 | Steve Williams | 73.5 | 19 |
| 5 | David Weber | 73.5 | 10 |
There are many different ways that could be used to measure the most improved player. USGA, WA Golf, and Golf Genius use an “improvement factor” that is calculated as (beginning handicap index + 12) / (ending handicap index +12). This factor, in theory, makes comparisons between higher and lower handicaps more valid than just comparing a reduction in strokes between a high and low handicap, for example. The beginning handicap for our league was sampled from the later of the Monday prior to the first Tuesday tournament or when the player joined the League, and the ending handicap was sampled on the Monday prior to the Tuesday Cup Final. The top 5 most improved players for 2023 are:
| Place | Player | 1st Index | Last Index | Improvement Factor | Rounds |
| 1 | Rick Wilson | 20.7 | 14.4 | 1.270 | 7 |
| 2 | Karl Meier | 10.9 | 6.6 | 1.239 | 29 |
| 3 | Dylan Fitzgerald | 10.0 | 6.1 | 1.215 | 28 |
| 4 | Oliver Rutz | 12.4 | 9.0 | 1.162 | 15 |
| 5 | Dan Fabela | 17.9 | 14.8 | 1.116 | 24 |
Our top-5 points’ winners were:
| Place | Player | Points | rounds |
| 1 | Karl Meier | 1009.00 | 29 |
| 2 | Robert Cameron | 945.75 | 24 |
| 3 | Jeff Williams | 899.67 | 24 |
| 4 | Dave Loy | 888.00 | 28 |
| 5 | Dylan Fitzgerald | 878.17 | 19 |
Finally, our top-5 purse (honey pot) winners were:
| Place | Player | Purse (Honeypots) | rounds |
| 1 | Dylan Fitzgerald | 345.00 | 28 |
| 2 | Gino Nathan | 319.00 | 19 |
| 3 | Cory Rockey | 314.00 | 25 |
| 4 | Tom Hom | 309.00 | 24 |
| 5 | Dan Fabela | 305.00 | 24 |
Congratulations to everyone that made one of the top-5 lists above! Additionally, congratulations to everyone that improved their golf game this year. I hope the League helped you to improve.
Note that most of the data for these statistics came from the “standings” tab in the League Portal. I encourage you to browse this area of the portal for yourself so that you can gather your own data. However, if you look at this section of the Portal, you’ll notice that the results I list here are somewhat different than what is on the portal. The reason for that is that 1) I separated out individual (eligible for posting to GHIN) events, from 2-man events, and from individual (NOT eligible for posting to GHIN) events; and 2) I excluded players that played in less than 5 Tuesday events from the individual stats listed above. Please let me know if you would like any help finding this information and/or comparing your statistics to the League statistics.
Best,
Karl