Refresh your mind on the Rules of Golf
It never hurts to give your knowledge a quick MOT by testing yourself on some of the common rules within golf. We are still finding that people are getting confused on where to drop, is it a penalty / not a penalty, is a penalty area different to a bunker, etc. We are all guilty of it at some point, even those of us in the industry!
The best way to brush up your rules game is to go to the R&A website and do the rules quizzes, they don’t take long and you can choose Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced if you’re really brave!
These quizzes take just a few minutes and you’d be surprised how much they help you, even if you just stay on the beginner ones, that will cover a lot of the basics you need to know that affect 95% of the game.
One of the questions which comes up frequently for me is about the local rule which the R&A suggested to clubs for speeding up play in casual golf about taking a drop from the fairway with two penalty strokes when going out of bounds. This, for me was where the R&A really confused things and made golf club officials’ jobs really difficult.
This local rule suggestion was never intended for qualifying competitions, and CANNOT be used in qualifying competitions, so for the R&A to suggest clubs adopting it for casual play has only confused things - and it’s widespread. Some people do think this is an official rule and can be used - it is definitely not.
From the off we stated clearly as a club we would not be adopting this rule for casual play, mainly to not confuse things, but also because casual play is just that - casual! Most golfers play to their own rules agreed between them in casual play (gimmes, mulligans etc), so it is pointless to create a local rule like this.