Scenarios

A New Course, Set Up Before You Leave the House

Turning up somewhere new costs you shots, and most of that cost is information you could have had days earlier. This is the setup half of the problem: whether the course is in the app at all, what the card tells you before you drive there, and what the round is worth to you on the second visit.

What this page covers

How to play an unfamiliar course is a golf question with a settled answer, and it has its own guide: how to play a course you have never played covers the twenty-minute pre-round recon, reading the stroke index as a difficulty map, the blind-shot rule, moving one tee set forward, and the default plan for a hole you learned nothing about. Read that one for the decisions.

This page covers the app side: what you do before you go, on the day, and afterwards, so the recon has something to attach itself to and the round pays off on the second visit too.

Find it before you drive there

The first question is unglamorous and the only one that really matters: is the course in the database? Do this days before, not in the car park with one bar of signal.

The courses tab has two ways in. Allow location access and it lists what is near you with distances, split into courses that are available now and courses that are known but not yet loaded. Or search by name, which is what you want for somewhere you are travelling to.

Three outcomes:

• It is there. Open it and read the card, below.
• It is not there. There is a request flow: name, location, and any detail you can add. You can leave an email so you can still be reached if you have left the app, and you get a message in the app when the course is added. Do this early. A request is a queue, not a button that materialises a scorecard.
• It is there but wrong. Wrong hole count, wrong par, missing tees, and there is a report path for exactly that. Courses get rebuilt from what people report, and a card with the wrong par quietly poisons every number the round produces.

Read the card at home

Open the course and you get its scorecard: every tee set with its total yardage, its par, and its Course Rating and Slope, then the holes with par, yardage and stroke index. That is the same information the guide tells you to read in the car park, available on the sofa a week earlier, which is a better place to make a tee decision than a first tee with a group waiting.

Two things to actually do with it.

Pick the tee set properly. Rating and Slope are per tee and they are what every handicap number for the round runs off. Men's and women's tees are rated separately even when the yardage is identical, so choose the one your handicap is tracked against. For the yardage decision itself, which tees should you play has the Tee It Forward arithmetic, and the standing advice for a first visit is to take the shorter end of your range.

Read the stroke index row as a difficulty map. The guide explains what that row is and is not. The useful move at home is simply to notice which four holes are index 1 to 4, because those are the holes where turning up unprepared is most expensive.

The plan that builds while you are not looking

ParPath is a plan for a specific course from a goal you choose. You pick a target score, and every hole gets a colour, Green to attack, Yellow to manage, Red to survive, and a target of par, bogey or worse, with the per-hole targets summing to the goal you picked.

The mechanism matters here, because a course nobody has played has no plan yet. Opening a course that has no strategies queues one to be generated in the background, per tee set. Until it lands, the app shows a starter plan built from the card, with a progress bar and a note that it is building the course-specific version. Once the real one is ready the app swaps it in. The generated plan is built from what the database knows about the course: par, stroke index, yardage and elevation on every hole, plus hazard positions, fairway width and landing-zone trouble on the holes that have been mapped in detail.

The practical instruction is one line. Open the course a few days before you play it, so the plan is generated, cached and waiting rather than being built on the first tee.

Two honesties about the plan on a course you have never seen. It is built from data, not from local knowledge, so it does not know that the ditch on the seventh is invisible from the tee or that the twelfth green runs away from you. On a course we have not mapped in detail yet, the plan works from what the card can tell it, which is less than a member knows and more than you will work out on the first tee. It is a starting classification of the holes, and your eyes on the tee sign still overrule it.

Whether the course is mapped, and what changes if it is not

Hole maps exist for the courses that have been mapped and not for the others. There is no automatic satellite coverage of every golf course on earth, and any app that implies otherwise is overselling. You will know within a second of opening the round: the map button either offers to open the map or says there is no map yet for this course.

On an unmapped course the round still works completely as a round. You lose the yardages and the picture, which on an unfamiliar course is exactly when you would most like them, and that is a real limitation rather than one to talk around. The mitigation is the guide's: aim at the widest thing you can see, approach to the middle of the green, and take the tee sign seriously.

The setup on the day

Four choices, and two of them are unfamiliar-course specific.

• Tee set: the one you decided on at home. Do not let the first tee talk you back a set.
• Holes: 18, or front nine or back nine if that is what you booked. On a nine-hole course, the Play the 9 Twice option is a distinct round shape rather than a pretend eighteen.
• Offline caching: when you reach the tee and holes step, the app pulls the scorecard down for offline use, and takes the hole maps and game plans too if the course has them. It tells you when it is cached. This step is why a new course should be opened while you still have signal, because remote courses often have none.
• Detailed stats: fairways, greens and putts are optional per round. On a course you have never seen, they are worth keeping on, because your first-visit misses are the notes you will want next time.

During the round, the one line to notice on each tee is the history row. On a course you have never played it reads that this is your first time on the hole, which is honest and mildly useful. What it becomes on the second visit is the point of the next section.

What the round leaves behind

The guide ends by telling you to write five notes per hole so the second visit is cheaper. This is the version that happens without you writing anything.

Every hole you score builds a per-hole record for that course: how many times you have played it, your average, your best score, the distribution of scores you have made there, and, if you tracked them, what your tee shots did. The next time you stand on that tee, the line above your scorecard reads your average and your best on the hole instead of telling you it is your first time. That is not the same as local knowledge, but it is the part of local knowledge that comes from having played the hole, and it accumulates whether or not you were paying attention.

The round summary also reports how many of the per-hole target scores you beat and names the holes where the score ran furthest past the target. On a first visit that list is the honest map of where the course got you, and it is a better basis for the second round than a general feeling that the back nine was hard. Scoring statistics track full-length rounds by default, with nine-hole, executive and par 3 rounds counted separately so an unusual first-visit layout does not skew your averages.

And the round counts. A completed round with at least fourteen holes scored, or seven on a nine-hole round, feeds the ParPath handicap estimate, which appears once you have three such rounds. It is an unofficial estimate for tracking your own progress, not a WHS Handicap Index, and official posting still goes through your club or association. A first visit to a hard course is a legitimate score, and there is a per-round toggle if you want to exclude a specific round from the estimate.