I would love to see UDisc take on the opportunity/challenge and develop a handicap system and course rating similar to ball golf that could compliment and/or replace pdga ratings. I feel like the data UDisc captures already is all that’s needed to develop this feature and could be another source of revenue for the company.
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Yeah at least several of us have said that we would love to have that in the app but thus far IIRC all we have seen /heard is that is in the LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG range plans and not any time SOON.
Hi @briantmc as @f1yingsquirrel said this has been requested by others. Add to the discussion here: League Managers setting handicaps
There is also a thread called: PDGA rating calculator for casual rounds
I just put a copy of the intro page to a spreadsheet I use to track my scores and calculate my rating. It then predicts my score at the current course. I’ll attach the image here as well.
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How do you calculate the SSA?
@jlegate I can’t speak for them, but usually people just scrape tournament data from the PDGA event page and take an average of what would have achieved a rating of 1000. Then they might add that info to the course listing on DGCR.
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I have two methods to get the SSA.
First, for most courses, I just have to use the best SSA that I can find. Usually, it is from dgcoursereview.com and it is questionable because they don’t have many datapoints (because UDisc is SO much better for most players tracking needs). This is not a great method.
Second, for the course where my league plays, I track the scores of all the players and have looked up their PDGA ratings. It is probably about 25% of the league. Then, using the rated players, I calculate an average SSA for the day and use it to calculate the ratings for everyone. This method is pretty darn solid and helps us to get players in the right level. It is interesting to see how the SSA changes on windy days. It is not as much as I would have thought unless it is really howling.
I’ll note that I had to do some good math to get equations that I feel are appropriate. The PDGA doesn’t publish them, so I had to do my best to match the data points that they provide. I’m happy to share what I have if requested but I won’t bore with the details unless that is what you are after.
Lastly, I’ll note that after I’ve personally played a course 5-10 times, I can pretty much tell if the SSA that I have is a reasonable one or not. Usually, they are a little high and that tends to make my rating look better than what I see in my league. But, the ratings are in the ballpark and I think that most players would understand that a rating calculated by general play would just be an estimate to be used for fun and tracking of personal improvement.
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UDisc has a massive data set. I’m excited to see what they do with it as they build on the recent release that classifies layout difficulty.
It’s a tricky tightrope for all the reasons previously listed but also because the sanctioned player rating algorithm is essentially a major funding stream for the PDGA.
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