June 11, 2023

CHOCOWINITY, NC — The Carl Spackler Open scrapped the tournament yardage, tees of play, and player eligibility after its 20th event in New Mexico. The Captains Club rebuilt the tournament in respects to yardage played from scratch including qualifications.

“We completely did away with past theories and started over,” said Captains Club member Bill Bateson. “The past yardages and eligibility were guesses and patch work. We need to remove all bias and history, get complex with analysis, and provide clear simple results year after year to include all forms of golfer.”

The first 5 years of tournaments had just one tee from 6,450 yards. A patch was added in 2006 with a senior tee. The Captains Club simply permitted older golfers (50 years) to move up one tee.

The Captains Club patched the senior tee again in 2014 by changing qualifications to both 50 years of age and at least a +15 stroke handicap.

“Nobody actually looked at hundreds of golfers independently,” said Bill Bateson. “Golf tournaments are often played from the same tee and that worked in 2003, but cannot work properly for an individual handicapped open golf tournament with 96 golfers ranging in age.”

The first step to rebuilding the tournament yardages was to collect club yardages from all participants. The event collected and continues to manage that collection as part of the Poststats golfer profile. “How far do people actually hit the ball,” asked Bateson? “No more guessing. Let’s require players to provide both honest scorecards and club yardages.”

The club yardage component was also added as a step inside annual event registration.

“We collected more than one hundred sets of club yardages and then created a tee analysis page on our website to display them,” added Bill Bateson. “We pulled personalized data from the Poststats database and populated that same webpage with golfer stroke handicaps, age, rounds played, and average yardage played.”

The Captains Club analyzed the data in the winter of 2022. “The only thing that was important to me was most data analysis came without golfers name,” says Chairman of the Captains Club Greg Long. “Let’s make decisions based on the data. If we don’t have enough, let’s go get it.”

The results to the tees of play were partially announced for the 2022 Carl Spackler Open. The golf tournament would have three sets of tees. The tournament, which remains at 6,450 yards. The senior tee, which was set at 6,000 yards. The 3rd super senior tee was created, which has no yardage. Super Seniors would play from the golf course tee marker ‘one forward’ of our senior tee.

“The actual algorithm uses a variety of data including age, golf skill, club yardage, and local or vacation rounds played,” says Bill Bateson. “Although we love feedback to improve our yardages for all players, we do not publish the agreed upon algorithm. Bill and the Captains Club will continue to evaluate the algorithm for several years and tweak as needed.”

The Tee Analysis page is available on our website under the PARTICIPANTS drop down menu. The page provides a large organized collection of golfer data for tee analysis.

The 2023 Carl Spackler Open will be held at Cypress Landing Golf Course in Chocowinity, NC. There are 84 participants scheduled to participate from 14 different states. Chad Cronauer from Virginia will return as the defending champion.