I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like we’ve had much run on the ball for long! It was a wet spring and now we’re already heading into winter golf. You know what that means? You hit your best shots and they don’t go anywhere, stopping dead with the ball caked in mud.

For us average golfers, losing some distance during the autumn and winter months can be demoralising when you struggle to get on long par 4s and 5s in regulation, especially if your golf club has introduced gender neutral winter tees that favour big hitters. I suppose another way of looking at it is that it could potentially be good for your game, challenging you in the winter might help you to excel when spring arrives again.

 To be honest, whether I’m playing at my home club or elsewhere, I find some holes very long at any time of the year, but if you feel like me, according to Fiona Womack from Bishops Stortford Golf Club and Sharon Eales from Royal Birkdale Golf Club, if you don’t reach the green in regulation, this is no reflection on our ability.

 The pair have undertaken some in-depth research and analysis and are on a mission to bring a model to life that will create a fairer golf experience for everyone. PGA Professional Katie Dawkins spoke to Fiona and Sharon for Golf Monthly, and you can read the article here.

 The crux of this is that we have to stop confusing distance with ability and equality with equity. As we know, telling golfers to play off tees that match their ability rather than the distance they hit doesn’t often go down too well, as it implies that shorter hitters are less skilled. In reality, this is not the case. For example, women who are big hitters and have a low handicap can often be less skilled than those women who take more shots to get to the green and then get up and down. I feel better already!

 Fiona and Sharon’s analysis found that in Great Britain and Ireland ‘appropriate tees’ often do not exist for men and juniors with slower than average swing speeds, or for the majority of female golfers. Most ‘red tees’ are around 1,000 yards too long to give a female bogey golfer the same experience as a male bogey golfer from the ‘yellows’. 

 It was amusing to see how their model illustrates inequality by showing how long a course would need to be for an average male golfer to experience what an average female experiences off the reds. For the 10th tee of the New Course at St Andrews, it would need to be 120 yards into the Eden Estuary!

Their findings and proposed model of how best to design ‘appropriate’ tees has been presented to The R&A and they have been working with renowned golf architect Tom Mackenzie, an advocate for more forward golf courses. It will be interesting to see where this leads to, but in the meantime, be happy with a bogey - you’re a skillful golfer!

Alison Root 

Women's Editor Golf Monthly