Competitive golf at club level needs a handicap system to thrive and would probably struggle to survive if there were no handicap-adjusted scores as the best players would win all the time and lesser players with a competitive desire would lose interest. On tour, of course, it is a different story with the best player, full stop, winning on any given week and the very best players triumphing multiple times over the course of their careers.
‘Nett scores’ are the by-product of the handicap scheme used at club level - the World Handicap System. First, a bit of a dictionary, or rather Wikipedia, definition: “A net (sometimes written nett) value is the resultant amount after accounting for the sum or difference of two or more variables. In economics, it is frequently used to imply the remaining value after accounting for a specific, commonly understood deduction. In these cases, it is contrasted with the term gross, which refers to the pre-deduction value.”
Golf may not be about economics but the principles are the same. Your ‘gross’ score is what you actually shoot in medal play (the cumulative total of all 18 holes), and your ‘nett’ score is what that reduces down to (or increases to for plus-handicappers!) once your course handicap for that round has been deducted from (or added to) your gross score. In other words, gross score minus course handicap equals nett score.
It really is that simple, but you can take it a little bit beyond that, too, because of the way your handicap is applied via the Stroke Indices on the scorecard. If you are an 8-handicapper, you get strokes on the holes with Stroke Indices from 1 to 8 (the holes are rated from 1 to 18). In a medal, that makes relatively little difference hole-by-hole other than perhaps psychologically (“well at least it was Stroke Index 4 so bogey is okay there”) as the course handicap is applied to the gross score at the end of the round to yield your overall nett score.
In a Stableford competition, where points are awarded for how you fare on each individual hole, your nett score for each hole becomes more relevant. You get two points for a nett par in a Stableford, one for a nett bogey, three for a nett birdie and so on, based on the Stroke Indices of the holes.
So again, if you’re off 8 and you make a bogey on that Stroke Index 4 par 4, you would get two points for a nett par, while a gross double-bogey six would nett down to a five, giving you a point still on a hole that hasn’t gone too well. You’re not obliged to keep your own Stableford score as you go round, but many golfers do, and knowing that your nett score has still earned you a point on a hole can give you a little bit of a mental boost as you walk to the next tee… probably more so than writing that double bogey down in a medal round would. So, the term ‘nett score’ in a Stableford is relevant on a hole-by-hole basis.
As we say, club golf needs a nett scoring system to thrive, and that is what the World Handicap System delivers.
