STATE OF THE IRON THONG, April 2010

 Gang,

 Your officers met on Thursday evening, April 15, to discuss some matters that will affect our club. Here is an update for you. 

Tourney, tourney, where’s the tourney? 

We just completed our 8^th semi-annual tournament, and it was a resounding success! Congratulations to Jamie McBride, who is our new King Thong for the next six months. We had 44 players, 42 who competed in the tournament. It was a great day for the ITG. We’re glad to see that almost everyone stayed afterwards for tourney results and trophy presentations. 

The question came up in our meeting whether it’s mandatory to play our tournaments on our home course. After debate, we decided that there’s nothing that keeps us from playing a semi-annual tournament somewhere else than at The Hawk. Unfortunately, the condition of The Hawk hasn’t been at its best lately, and we had some complaints about it from members. Should we go somewhere else? For that matter, should we change home courses? 

We’re booked at The Hawk through the rest of the year, so we won’t be changing right away. We are, though, going to approach some of the other courses in our rotations to see if they’d be interested in being our home course. If we can work something out, we will. The Hawk, regardless of the condition it’s in, treats us pretty well and is probably the least expensive course we play, both in greens fees and cost of food and drinks. They’ll remain our home course through this year. 

But we may very well play our next tournament somewhere else. Once again, we’re going to be checking to see what kind of a deal we can get from other courses, and we’ll let you know. 

Break that tie, but do it in private 

Every tournament is a learning experience for our club and its officers. We had a bit of an argument this last time between a couple of our officers, and a couple of minor mistakes made in tabulating results. To keep this from happening again, we’ve made a couple of changes in procedure.  

The point of contention was how to determine a tie breaker when awarding trophies and money for fewest putts. In the past, whenever we had a tie between players for any of the low net categories, we went to the number one handicap hole and compared scores. If we had to, we went to the next handicap hole and compared, and so on until we had a winner. We’ll keep doing that. But we’re changing the procedure for determining a tie breaker for fewest putts. We’ll first compare total front nine putts and then total back nine putts to determine a winner. If that doesn’t work, then we’ll go to the number one handicap hole and compare, but we’ll compare putts, not scores. It’s fairer. 

The big difference is that from now on, the officers will take the cards and the hole markers and go to a separate room where we can have some privacy. While you’all will be whooping it up, telling stories, eating lunch and drinking beer, we’ll be figuring out the tournament results, in private. When we come back, we’ll have double-checked our calculations and there won’t be any mistakes made, we hope. 

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, I mean, it’s not the handicap, it’s the percentage

 You might not all be aware that we play our Saturday games using 100 percent of our handicaps. This gives everyone the maximum number of strokes possible to determine net scores. This seems to work fine as long as we’re only competing within our flights, where there won’t be a tremendous difference in handicaps. We don’t see any reason to change that.

 But playing our semi-annual tournaments and giving 100 percent of handicap is another matter. The suggested percentage by the USGA is 80 percent. That gives the high handicappers a few less strokes to subtract for net scores when compared to the low handicappers. If we’d done it that way during our last tournament, all three flight winners in low net would have been the same, but with more reasonable scores (66s and a 68). It also means that we’d have had a different overall winner, but we would have had to go to the third tie-breaker to determine it. In other words, the scores would have been closer and the competition would have been better. So from now on, we’re going to score our semi-annual tournaments at 80 percent of handicap.

 One of the reasons this has become an issue is that we’re growing at such a rapid rate. We have more players and more spread between our low and high handicappers than ever before. To that end, we’re also going to change the number of flights at our semi-annual tournament. If we have 40 players (and we had more than that last time), we’ll split into four flights instead of three. That means there will be a fourth flight to win net, gross, closest-to-the-pin and fewest putts trophies and money. More chances to win! It also means that the spread between low and high handicaps within each flight will be closer together and more competitive.

 How logo can you go?

 The ITG has logo towels for sale. We’ve sold quite a few to our members, but we have 20 or so left. The price has been $10 each, but we’re having a special sale to see if we can sell the rest. So here’s your chance – buy an ITG logo towel in your favorite color for only $5 until supplies run out! See Mike Linares to make your purchase.

 We’re also having ITG logo hats made. We’ll let you know when they come in and the price. We’re toying with the idea of letting you pre-order hats online.

 But I want to play with so-and-so…

You still can. We group our players together by their last low net score, not by handicap. This way, high handicappers get to play with low handicappers, if their last net score was good enough. This is good in a number of ways. First, it allows all of our members to play in groups with any other member. We all get to know each other better. Remember, our motto is to “share good space.” Also, even though some of the low handicappers may not realize it, they’re role models for the higher handicappers. The members who normally shoot in triple digits get to see how the single digit handicappers do it. They learn course management, pick up pointers, and generally improve their game.

Of course, if you have a particular member you want to share a group with, then you can let me know by asking to be paired with someone specific in the comments section when you sign up. I always try to accommodate players when they request it. Just try to keep it to one person; don’t try to set up a foursome of your own. I also try to pair members and their guests in the same group.

Our dance calendar is almost full

This week, we added The Bandit, Pine Forest (in Bastrop), Concan, Tapatio Springs and Landa Park to our schedule – all for less than $50 each! We have only one open date left! Take a look at the schedule next time you confirm that you’re playing.

That’s all for now

In short, the state of the Iron Thong is excellent! We’re still growing and increasing our influence in the San Antonio golf community. Your officers meet periodically, so if you have any topics you’d like us to discuss, just email us at the “Ask the Pres” button on the home page.

See ya’all next Saturday.

Steve VanWert
President, Iron Thong Golf