Post by mudball on May 4, 2010 3:28:58 GMT -5
You can read about it a little more at my blog at mud-ball-golf-blog.blogspot.com/2010/05/technology-can-ruin-your-game-beware.html if you want to but for my friends on Richie's forum I have an interesting story to share...
I played in a county match against another club this weekend. We are a small club and usually get knocked out in the first round of these scratch competitions - well this Sunday was the premier event in the Essex calendar. This competition is aimed at the low handicap and scratch players. We usually get thrashed.
I was team captain, and we got lucky with a home draw. I couldn't believe my luck when after the morning foursomes we were 3 & 1/2 points to 1 1/2 in the lead... the gloss was taken off fairly quickly when one of the opponents raised an issue with a trolley one of our team had been using and also which I was using as well. The trolley had a feature to measure distance traveled and also temperature. It was pointed out these were not allowed.
It was news to me and to be honest I never look at the temperature or use the measurement feature anyway. It was cold and raining like stair rods, literally cats and dogs all day long - I didn't need a thermometer to tell me it was a cr@p day!
We tried to contact the officials running the county competition to clarify the points raised but couldn't - the player who raised the issue made it clear he was not claiming the point just that he had suffered from this in the past and wanted clarity on the ruling. However, I explained to him that now it was raised and if it was correct we'd have to call the foul on ourselves anyway.
So this meant that instead of being 2 points in front going into the singles we were probably 2 points behind. We found a way to disable the display so these features didn't work and went back out into the wind and rain for the afternoon singles. I took each player to one side and said we had to assume the worse and get on with it and win more than our fair share in the afternoon. Keep in mind we usually get thrashed in this competition...
Well would you believe it we won 9/10 of the afternoon singles matches.
It turns out that we were wrong to use these trolleys and whilst the measurement device is OK the rules are we have to turn off the other features... so beware the dreaded technology that is there to use but perhaps you don't even use it - it might be illegal!
I played in a county match against another club this weekend. We are a small club and usually get knocked out in the first round of these scratch competitions - well this Sunday was the premier event in the Essex calendar. This competition is aimed at the low handicap and scratch players. We usually get thrashed.
I was team captain, and we got lucky with a home draw. I couldn't believe my luck when after the morning foursomes we were 3 & 1/2 points to 1 1/2 in the lead... the gloss was taken off fairly quickly when one of the opponents raised an issue with a trolley one of our team had been using and also which I was using as well. The trolley had a feature to measure distance traveled and also temperature. It was pointed out these were not allowed.
It was news to me and to be honest I never look at the temperature or use the measurement feature anyway. It was cold and raining like stair rods, literally cats and dogs all day long - I didn't need a thermometer to tell me it was a cr@p day!
We tried to contact the officials running the county competition to clarify the points raised but couldn't - the player who raised the issue made it clear he was not claiming the point just that he had suffered from this in the past and wanted clarity on the ruling. However, I explained to him that now it was raised and if it was correct we'd have to call the foul on ourselves anyway.
So this meant that instead of being 2 points in front going into the singles we were probably 2 points behind. We found a way to disable the display so these features didn't work and went back out into the wind and rain for the afternoon singles. I took each player to one side and said we had to assume the worse and get on with it and win more than our fair share in the afternoon. Keep in mind we usually get thrashed in this competition...
Well would you believe it we won 9/10 of the afternoon singles matches.
It turns out that we were wrong to use these trolleys and whilst the measurement device is OK the rules are we have to turn off the other features... so beware the dreaded technology that is there to use but perhaps you don't even use it - it might be illegal!
