The Misshits Index
TOUGHEST
TRACKS
Every SA golf course rated and ranked — not by one number, but by a weighted blend that actually makes sense. Below is how the numbers work and why we built our own.
Stroke Rating vs
Course Rating vs Slope
What each number actually measures — and why they disagree.
SA Stroke Rating
- •The old SAGA/GolfRSA single-number rating, still shown on SA cards.
- •An integer: the score a scratch golfer is expected to shoot.
- •One number for everyone — no adjustment for higher handicaps.
- •Being whole numbers, lots of courses tie — poor for fine ranking.
USGA Course Rating
- •Expected score for a SCRATCH golfer, to one decimal (e.g. 78.8).
- •Based on effective length plus obstacles: bunkers, water, rough, wind, altitude.
- •The purest single measure of raw difficulty off a given tee.
- •Rated separately per tee AND per gender — a women's 79.9 is not harder than a men's 78.8.
Slope Rating
- •How much HARDER the course gets for a bogey golfer relative to scratch.
- •Scale 55–155; 113 is a course of standard relative difficulty.
- •It is NOT absolute difficulty — a short, penal course can out-slope a long brute.
- •High slope = punishes mishits: forced carries, hazards, thick rough.
Why the Three Ratings Disagree
- •Sorting the full list mixes men’s and women’s ratings — different scratch benchmarks, not comparable.
- •Slope ranks relative punishment, CR ranks scratch difficulty, SR is a coarse integer version of CR.
- •Each answers a different question, so each produces a different ‘hardest’.
Our Fix
The Misshits Index
- •Population: the hardest-rated MEN’S tee at each of the 436 facilities with ratings.
- •Each measure normalised 0–100 across that population (min–max).
- •Weighted: 45% Course Rating + 35% Slope + 20% Stroke Rating.
- •CR carries most weight (purest measure); slope adds the bogey-golfer dimension; SR least (integer, some gaps).
- •Where SR is unrated (NA), the index reweights to 56% CR / 44% Slope.
- •Leopard Creek has no published CR/Slope in this dataset, so it cannot be ranked.