Glossary

Golf scoring terms, explained

Plain-English definitions of the handicap, scoring and tournament terms you’ll meet on Caddyio.

World Handicap System (WHS): The global standard for measuring golfing ability, giving every player a single portable Handicap Index that works across courses and countries.
Handicap Index: A number representing a player's demonstrated ability, calculated from their best recent scores. It is converted to a Course Handicap for the specific course and tees being played.
Score Differential: How a single round compares with the course's difficulty — roughly how many strokes better or worse than the course rating you played, adjusted for slope. A Handicap Index is the average of a player's best 8 differentials from their last 20 rounds.
Course Handicap: The number of strokes a player receives on a particular course and tee set, derived from their Handicap Index using the course's slope and rating.
Stroke Index: A 1–18 ranking of holes by difficulty, used to allocate handicap strokes. Lower stroke-index holes are where higher-handicap players receive shots.
Par: The number of strokes an expert golfer is expected to need to complete a hole or course. A typical 18-hole course is around par 72.
Gross score: The total number of strokes actually taken, before any handicap adjustment.
Net score: The gross score minus the player's handicap strokes, allowing players of different abilities to compete fairly.
Stableford: A scoring format that awards points per hole based on net score relative to par (e.g. 2 points for a net par). The highest points total wins, and a bad hole costs only that hole.
Stroke play: A format where the total number of strokes over the round decides the result — the lowest total wins.
Match play: A format where players or teams compete hole by hole; the side winning the most holes wins the match.
Scramble: A team format where every player tees off, the team picks the best shot, and all players play their next shot from there.
Course Rating: The expected score for a scratch golfer on a given course and tees, expressed in strokes (e.g. 71.4).
Slope Rating: A measure of a course's relative difficulty for a bogey golfer compared with a scratch golfer, from 55 to 155 (113 is average).
Tee set: A set of teeing grounds (e.g. white, yellow, red) with its own yardages and ratings. Players choose a tee set appropriate to their game.
Birdie, eagle, bogey: Scores relative to par on a hole: a birdie is one under, an eagle two under, a bogey one over, and a double bogey two over.
Eclectic: A season-long format that takes a player's best score on each individual hole across several rounds and combines them into one composite card. Run as a gross or net eclectic.
Order of Merit: A season-long ranking that awards points for results across a series of competitions. Points accumulate through the season — often counting each player's best few results — to decide an overall winner.
Visitor round / away score: A round a member plays at a club other than their home club. On a multi-club platform the visitor checks in at the host club, and their away scores still count towards their playing record.
Member purse: A prepaid balance a member holds with their club, topped up in advance and spent on the course — for example charging food and drink orders straight to the purse instead of paying each time.
Orthomosaic: A single, large aerial image stitched together from many overlapping photos and corrected so every point is to true scale — like a distortion-free map you can measure distances on. A drone survey of a golf course produces a high-resolution orthomosaic used as the course map.
Photogrammetry: The technique of building accurate measurements and 3D models from photographs. By capturing a course from many angles, photogrammetry reconstructs a 3D model of the holes — the basis for flyovers and precise hole geometry.
Shot tracking: Recording each shot as you play it — the club used and the spot it was struck from. In Caddyio a member does this by tapping in the scoring app, so the position comes from the phone's GPS rather than from sensors in the grips.
Shot map: A satellite view of the course with a player's logged shots plotted on it, each hole traced from the tee through every shot. A coach uses it to see how a round was actually played rather than how it is remembered.
Dispersion: The spread of where shots with the same club finish. A single average carry hides it; plotting every shot with one club shows the shape of the miss — which side, and how far off, a player tends to be.
Carry vs total distance: Carry is how far a shot flies through the air; total distance includes the run after it lands. Launch monitors measure carry. Caddyio measures total distance — from where a shot was struck to where the ball came to rest — because that is what two GPS positions can honestly tell you.
Green fee: What a golfer pays to play a round without being a member of the club. On a Caddyio tee sheet a club sets a per-player green fee for each course, and it applies to visitors — and to members whose subscription is not up to date.
Corporate account: A company that has pre-paid a club for a block of rounds covering a period, usually a year. The people the club nominates on the account draw those rounds down as they book, and the balance goes back up if a booking is declined or cancelled.
Draw-down: Spending against a balance that was paid for in advance. A corporate account's rounds are drawn down one per player as a booking is made, rather than being counted up and invoiced afterwards.
Greenkeeping: The work of maintaining the playing surfaces of a golf course. In Caddyio it also names the screen where staff triage the course conditions members report from their rounds, and publish notices — coring, temporary greens, closures — back to everyone playing.
Course notice: A short message from the club about the state of the course, shown on the round screen of every member currently playing. Used for maintenance, temporary greens and closures — information that is only useful before a golfer reaches the hole.
Dormant member: A member who has stopped playing without resigning. Because they still appear on the roster, dormancy is invisible until renewal; a club that can see who has not recorded a round in months can make the call while it still helps.