Personal performance review · Tom Phipps
Leighton Buzzard Golf Club · par 71 · 35 rounds · May 2025 – Jun 2026
Your score is governed by big numbers: you lose 18.7 shots a round to doubles and triples, nearly half your holes go double-bogey or worse, and par is rare at under one hole in five. What stands out in the data is the breadth — six holes blow up more than half the time, and the damage spans long holes and short ones alike. Your handicap reconstructs cleanly to ~20.5. That breadth is the finding: this isn't a few bad holes or a single club. It's consistent with the strike issues you describe, and if so a root-cause fix would lift the whole card at once.
01 — Form
You average about 25 over par, with a third of your rounds at 99 or higher and only one in eleven breaking 89. Your best stretch came around August–September 2025 (a five-round rolling average of 91.6), and the standout is a single 83 on 7 September — twelve shots below your average and clear evidence the good golf is in there. But it stands alone; your next-best round is an 87. The gap between that 83 and a typical mid-90s card is almost entirely how many holes got away from you that day.
35 full 18-hole rounds underpin this report — a large, reliable sample, so the patterns below can be read with confidence rather than as hints.
02 — The scoring engine
This is the heart of it. 40.8% of your holes go double-bogey or worse, bleeding 18.7 shots a round, and triples alone (15.4% of holes — almost three a round) cost 9.5 shots. Par is rare for you, at under one hole in five. The entire scoreboard is governed by these big numbers — your bogey rate is unremarkable, so it's the doubles and triples, not your pars and bogeys, that set your handicap.
| Outcome (per hole) | Share | Cost / round |
|---|---|---|
| Birdie or better | 3.3% | −0.6 |
| Par | 18.7% | — |
| Bogey | 37.1% | +6.7 |
| Double | 25.4% | +9.1 |
| Triple+ | 15.4% | +9.5 |
Put it the other way round: a card with your exact bogey rate but a normal double-and-triple rate would be low-80s golf for you. The whole journey from 20 to 15 — and well beyond — is converting those doubles and triples into bogeys. The data below points to where they cluster and, just as usefully, where they don't.
03 — Hole by hole
Each hole's scoring shape, in playing order. Red flags mark holes that go double-or-worse more than half the time — you have six of them, the clearest possible sign the problem is broad, not local. The trend arrow compares the second half of your rounds against the first.
Your worst holes split into two groups — and that split is the most useful thing on this page:
| Hole | Par / Yds | vs par | Blow-up | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18 | 4 / 325 | +2.20 | 60% | Your worst hole — 13 triples in 35 rounds on a closing hole that isn't even long. |
| 1 | 4 / 406 | +1.89 | 57% | Cold, long opener. Eleven triples. |
| 12 | 5 / 476 | +1.74 | 60% | Long par 5 — multiple long clubs, multiple chances to lose it right. |
| 7 | 5 / 474 | +1.69 | 60% | The other long par 5. Seventeen doubles — relentless. |
| 2 | 3 / 156 | +1.54 | 40% | A 156-yard par 3 ranking with your long par 5s is the standout — a short-iron hole, not a long club. |
| 9 | 3 / 169 | +1.40 | 37% | Another short par 3 leaking — so the damage isn't confined to the long clubs. |
The long holes are your worst as a group — par 5s at +1.57/hole, ahead of par 4s (+1.42) and par 3s (+1.10) — which fits the "lose it right with the longer clubs" pattern you describe. But par-4 length only moderately predicts your score (r=0.56, well below a purely tee-driven golfer's), and the reason is the short par 3s: holes 2 and 9 are short-iron approaches, yet they rank among your hardest holes. So the data won't let the blame sit on one club — the damage is spread across long and short alike. That breadth is consistent with the whole-bag contact issues you mention, but the firm, data-only conclusion is the narrower one: right now, no category of hole is safe.
04 — Within the round
Split into a start (1–4), middle (5–14) and finish (15–18), expressed per hole so the unequal sections compare fairly:
| Section | Over par / hole | Significance vs middle |
|---|---|---|
| Start (1–4) | +1.34 | not significant · p 0.68 |
| Middle (5–14) | +1.29 | your baseline |
| Finish (15–18) | +1.63 | significant · p 0.02 |
The closing four are significantly worse than your baseline (paired t-test p≈0.02; Wilcoxon p=0.023; it survives multiple-comparison correction at p≈0.04) — a real fade, with 35 rounds behind it. Most of it is hole 18 (+2.20, thirteen triples), the worst hole on your card, sitting at the very end. The start is not significant as a block: hole 1 spikes (+1.89), but holes 2–4 settle back to +1.15. Front 9 versus Back 9 is a non-event (+1.36 vs +1.39, p=0.74), so it's specifically the last four holes, not the back nine.
Part of this is that 15, 16 and 18 are genuinely demanding holes; part is the familiar late-round drop in concentration and energy. Either way, a reset and a conservative plan over the closing stretch is worth real strokes.
05 — The handicap insight
Even your other 14 holes average +1.23 per hole — there's no clean baseline to project to, which itself tells the story. Replay your four worst (18, 1, 12, 7) at that pace and your notional gross only drops from 95.7 to about 93.1. Run through the World Handicap System on Leighton Buzzard's yellow figures (slope 121, rating ≈68.7–69.7):
| Scenario | Avg gross | Handicap index |
|---|---|---|
| Your actual game (all 18) | 95.7 | ~19.7–20.6 |
| Worst 4 played at your "other 14" standard | 93.1 | ~17.6–18.4 |
| All six blow-up holes fixed | 91.9 | ~17.2–18.0 |
| Your target | ~85 | 15.0 |
The damage is spread across the whole card.
The method validates: the actual-game calculation lands at ~20.5, matching your real handicap. But notice how little erasing holes achieves — even fixing all six blow-up holes only reaches ~17.5, because the big numbers aren't trapped in a few places. That reframes the target: fifteen isn't a hole-by-hole project, it's about lifting the floor across the whole round. A shared root cause would do exactly that — and your own read points at contact — which is why it's worth chasing at source rather than hole by hole.
06 — Your best rounds
Across your eight counting rounds (best differentials of the last 20, averaging 90.8 gross), the gains come from turning some disasters into bogeys — but the disasters never disappear:
| Scoring mix | All rounds | Best 8 |
|---|---|---|
| Par or better | 22% | 27% |
| Bogey | 37% | 44% |
| Double | 25% | 19% |
| Triple+ | 15% | 9% |
On your best days your par rate barely moves (22% → 27%); the improvement is doubles and triples becoming bogeys. And several of your worst holes don't improve at all, no matter how well the round is going:
| Hole | All rounds | Best 8 | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 | +2.20 | +1.75 | eases |
| 7 | +1.69 | +1.50 | eases |
| 1 | +1.89 | +1.88 | unchanged |
| 12 | +1.74 | +1.88 | no better |
Five of your holes are essentially form-proof — holes 1, 7, 12, 13 and 18 stay brutal even on your best days, and the long par 5 (12) actually gets worse. You can't "play well" your way past these, which says their cause runs deeper than a hot or cold round — something structural in how those particular shots come off. That's the strongest hint in the data that the highest-leverage work sits at source — plausibly the strike your own read flags — rather than purely on the scorecard.
07 — Priorities
The honest read from the data: this isn't a strategy problem or a four-holes problem. Your score is dominated by big numbers, and they're spread right across the course — long and short, start to finish. That breadth is the clue: it points to a shared root cause rather than a list of unrelated faults, and your own sense of your striking is a reasonable place to aim the search. Damage-limitation buys strokes now; addressing the root unlocks the rest — and there are nearly nineteen shots a round on the table.