The PDGA released their latest ratings post, and the news made me very excited. I had one tournament “in the queue” where I had done extremely poor, coming in DFL (definition for the uninitiated, see #2), but I also had a tournament where I shot lights-out and scored my first ever sanctioned cash. I went online to check it out and… my rating jumped by 27 points from 931 to 958! Woooo!!!
The numbers don’t mean much to people outside the sport of disc golf, but you can look at it like this. A “scratch” golfer in normal golf would typically shoot a course at par, whereas someone with a handicap of 7 would typically shoot 7 strokes over par. In disc golf, a 1000 rating is considered roughly “scratch” golf (there are top pros with ratings higher but we won’t address that here). On average, every 10 points in your rating that you drop below 1000 is worth 1 stroke on the course, which means that a 958 puts me just over a 4 handicap in layman’s terms.
After finally earning a 920 rating in September of ‘04, and then from September of ‘05 until now bouncing between a 931 and a 941, going up to 958 is a huge improvement for me and gives me some positive reinforcement that I can shoot good golf. Now I just have to try and keep it up!