Questions
Before you get in touch
The questions committees actually ask, answered plainly, including the one about whether a club is a good fit, which has a structural answer rather than a polite one.
Will this work at our club?Usually yes. The exceptions are structural:
- fewer than about 80 rounds a day
- fewer than 35% of them posted for handicap
- less than 15 points of index spread among the members who do post
What exactly do you measure?Field scoring average versus par: the mean score of everyone who played. Not the best score, not the low handicaps. Everyone. One season gives a number; several, computed identically, give a movement. Architecture does not change between seasons. Everything else does.
Couldn’t our head pro work this out?He could do the arithmetic in an afternoon. The hard part is holding the method fixed for 6 years, separating a wet April from a firmer golf course, and saying whether the movement beats the noise. And he may not be here in 6 years. Green chairs serve 2 or 3, professionals and superintendents move on, and the club’s memory leaves with them. The method has to outlast the people, and it has to come from somebody whose own work is not being measured by it.
Why “adjusted”?Because the comparison is restricted to a window over which the population playing your course is stable. Nothing is applied to the statistic itself. It is mean score minus par. The discipline is in deciding what may be compared with what.
Isn’t this just strokes gained?No. Strokes gained is player-centred by construction: venue effects get absorbed into pooled baselines rather than estimated. Right tool for ranking players, wrong one for ranking courses — and it needs shot tracking, which exists on the PGA Tour and almost nowhere else.
What if it says our course is easy?Then it says that, and you have learned something true. Your tier is yours alone, and FogBow is paid the same either way.
Does this evaluate our professional or superintendent?No. It measures the golf course. Setup decisions appear in the numbers because they move the golf course, and the report says which ones and by how much, which is as useful for defending a decision as for questioning one. Nothing in it rates a person’s work.
What happens to our scoring data?It produces your report and nothing else. Not published, not resold, not used to train anything. It arrives de‑identified. Golfers carry codes you assign, and the key never leaves your club. It is combined with another club’s data only if you sign a separate consent: optional, free to decline, course-level statistics only, never an individual round, withdrawable at any time.
What do we have to give you?Scoring records and a few facts about your setup. In practice that means the rounds your members already post. A club admin can export the lot in one file from the USGA Admin Portal — Reports › Templates › Scores Posted Report — across whatever date range you choose, with the tee played and any Playing Conditions Calculation included. That export carries totals rather than hole-by-hole, so for anything decided at hole level, such as stroke-index allocation, we also ask for competition results from Golf Genius or whatever software runs your events. No site visit, and no weather station. Public reanalysis covers your coordinates free.
What if nothing has changed at our course?That is a finding, and a useful one. A club that believes its greens have quickened over 5 years and discovers they have not has learned something.
Still deciding? Read a full sample report · Get in touch