World Handicap System under intense scrutiny with nearly 2,000 EMAILS a week
The World Handicap System was launched on November 2nd and England Golf have received an incredible number of emails with questions from golf club members.
The World Handicap System team at England Golf received a staggering 47,000 emails between November 2nd and Christmas, as the confusion goes on about the new system.
With enquiries still coming in at roughly 1,700 times per week, the Golf Club Manager's Association held a webinar in which the scale of England Golf's task was revealed.
Gemma Hunter, who is England Golf’s head of handicapping and course rating, described the difficulties faced with such a large scale of correspondence, due to the fact that golf was shut down over the winter and re-opened in March.
This meant that the World Handicap System effectively had two launches. Hunter said that most of the email enquiries were about basic concerns with passwords and membership numbers.
Hunter appealed to golf club managers across the UK to answer as many questions from their members as possible and to guide them, in order to alleviate the pressure on England Golf.
"We appreciate it's not where we would want to be," said Hunter, in an interview with the National Club Golfer.
"But we are working to improve that. We hope that within the next week to 10 days, we will be dealing with things within the last 72 hours. So all I would say is please bear with us, we will get round to it.
"I would ask, and it's a plea from me to you as golf club managers, that wherever possible, you could let your members know what their CDH numbers are, explain to them where the answers to those basic questions can be found.
"This would certainly free up a lot of our capacity to actually deal with the issues or the main problems that people are having, because that does take up a lot of our time."
The World Handicap System has caused some controversy and confusion since its inception. Players now have a handicap index which they take to the course, and based on the course rating and slope rating, they are then given a playing handicap for the day.
It was established in January 2020 and is described by the R&A as "a more inclusive handicapping system" than the previous one.
