Do you play golf just for pleasure, trying to shoot your lowest
score and beat your regular playing buddies? Or do you enjoy the
excitement and buzz of competing against a wider field in tournament
play, either at your country club (or local course) or even at high
profile events?
The question is, should you or your caddie use a laser range finder to help you determine the distance to the green, or any other object on the course, for example water hazards or bunkers? Some people might consider this to be cheating, however is this just another albeit high tech way of calculating distances. Golfers or their caddies have been measuring course distances hole by hole forever. The golf course even supplies a detailed map of each hole on the course, showing driving distances, distance to any hazards, distance to the pin etc. Even on the course itself there are permanent distance markers (colored markers on the fairway) and a lot of courses have a 150 yard to the center of the green marker (sometimes a stake at the edge of the fairway or even a particular bush is strategically planted on every hole).
While using a range finder when playing a Sunday morning round with your buddies may help you, I'm sure it won't be long before they're borrowing it to measure their long drives or distance to the pin. Obviously if you only ever play at your country club and don't visit other courses then you will have a lot of local knowledge of your course and probably a range finder device is not for you. But what if you enter competitions at your club or play in competitively at a selection of courses, can you use a range finder to help you?
Well according to the USPGA Rules of Golf you can, I searched for the question "Do laser range finders conform?" and the answer was:
"Yes, provided that the local Committee (i.e., committee in charge of a particular competition, golf course, Rules of Golf Committee, etc.) has established a Local Rule allowing players to use devices that measure distance only. Use of devices that gauge or measure other conditions that might affect a player's play (e.g., wind, gradient, temperature, etc.) is not permitted, regardless of whether any such additional functions are actually used."
So we have discovered that it's legal to use golf range finders, just make sure that if you intend to use one during tournament play pick a basic model that doesn't have all the features that the USPGA regard as illegal, and only measures distance, you have been warned! The laser range finders with all the cleaver stuff like slope technology (this adjusts the distance to take account of any change in gradient), will obviously help you learn to gauge distances for yourself, and is OK for unofficial just for pleasure rounds of golf. However the big thing here is that you have to know how far you can hit a golf ball with each club in the bag, it's useless information knowing the distance is 225 yards, but you don't which club to select to hit the ball that distance.
I recommend that if you decide to invest in one of these devices that you first use it on the driving range to determine your average distances with each club, before trying it for real on the course.
Finally it's up to the individual golfer to decide if they wish to embrace the new technology or stick to traditional methods of determining the distances on the course.
The question is, should you or your caddie use a laser range finder to help you determine the distance to the green, or any other object on the course, for example water hazards or bunkers? Some people might consider this to be cheating, however is this just another albeit high tech way of calculating distances. Golfers or their caddies have been measuring course distances hole by hole forever. The golf course even supplies a detailed map of each hole on the course, showing driving distances, distance to any hazards, distance to the pin etc. Even on the course itself there are permanent distance markers (colored markers on the fairway) and a lot of courses have a 150 yard to the center of the green marker (sometimes a stake at the edge of the fairway or even a particular bush is strategically planted on every hole).
While using a range finder when playing a Sunday morning round with your buddies may help you, I'm sure it won't be long before they're borrowing it to measure their long drives or distance to the pin. Obviously if you only ever play at your country club and don't visit other courses then you will have a lot of local knowledge of your course and probably a range finder device is not for you. But what if you enter competitions at your club or play in competitively at a selection of courses, can you use a range finder to help you?
Well according to the USPGA Rules of Golf you can, I searched for the question "Do laser range finders conform?" and the answer was:
"Yes, provided that the local Committee (i.e., committee in charge of a particular competition, golf course, Rules of Golf Committee, etc.) has established a Local Rule allowing players to use devices that measure distance only. Use of devices that gauge or measure other conditions that might affect a player's play (e.g., wind, gradient, temperature, etc.) is not permitted, regardless of whether any such additional functions are actually used."
So we have discovered that it's legal to use golf range finders, just make sure that if you intend to use one during tournament play pick a basic model that doesn't have all the features that the USPGA regard as illegal, and only measures distance, you have been warned! The laser range finders with all the cleaver stuff like slope technology (this adjusts the distance to take account of any change in gradient), will obviously help you learn to gauge distances for yourself, and is OK for unofficial just for pleasure rounds of golf. However the big thing here is that you have to know how far you can hit a golf ball with each club in the bag, it's useless information knowing the distance is 225 yards, but you don't which club to select to hit the ball that distance.
I recommend that if you decide to invest in one of these devices that you first use it on the driving range to determine your average distances with each club, before trying it for real on the course.
Finally it's up to the individual golfer to decide if they wish to embrace the new technology or stick to traditional methods of determining the distances on the course.
No comments:
Post a Comment