amateurgolf.com and Golfweek Magazine partner on rankings
07 May 2009
by AmateurGolf.com Staff
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CARLSBAD, Calif. (May 7, 2009) -- Golfweek has teamed up with leading golf tournament website amateurgolf.com to provide the technology behind the new Golfweek/amateurgolf.com Men’s Amateur Rankings which are now live on
www.golfweek.com.
The amateur game is the soul of Golfweek. Players, coaches, tournament directors as well as friends and family and fans of the game have long viewed the Florida publication's Men's Rankings, as the gold standard. Over the years it has become ubiquitous to refer to a tournament being a "Golfweek Rankings points event".
The Golfweek/amateur golf.com rankings calculate, in almost real time, the performance of players in over 130 worldwide events. With points tables that go deeper than the old rankings, the Golfweek/amateurgolf.com rankings now include over 1800 players across the globe, with 800 on the U.S. list.
Navigating through the data starts with the World Rankings list, which resembles a PGA Tour money list and shows a country flag next to each ranked player. A single click on a link at the top of this page jumps the viewer to a United States-only list.
Drilling deeper into a player’s tournament record is done by clicking on that player’s name, which launches the amateurgolf.com website, where a complete list of all the events where the player earned points can be viewed. A modest membership fee of $45 provides access to the rankings data, plus the most comprehensive listing of golf tournaments on the web, including entry criteria and contact information.
Rankings are calculated based on points earned over the previous 52 week period on a running basis. By the end of 2009, this running calculation will extend to two years.
For most of 2008 and early 2009, Danny Lee of New Zealand, with huge wins at the Western Amateur and U.S. Amateur, led the World Rankings by a significant margin. Since Lee turned professional after The Masters, Rickie Fowler of California is the new number one, on the strength of winning the 2008 World Amateur Team Championship, the 2008 Sunnehanna Amateur, making the cut in the U.S. Open, and posting solid performances deep into match play at the U.S. Amateur and Public Links Championships.
Rankings are important for a number of reasons. However when rankings are applied -- on a worldwide basis no less -- to a sport in which the top players rarely compete against each other there is naturally a degree of subjectivity involved. Clearly, these players do not enter the same tournaments with the frequency of top professionals, who could see each other as many as ten to fifteen times per year.
Viewing the rankings by “United States-only” takes a degree of subjectivity away, as almost all top U.S. players will attempt to qualify for major championships like the U.S. Amateur. Many of them will also meet up at historic tournaments like the Porter Cup, the Northeast Amateur, or the Western Am.
The current U.S. rankings view reveals some interesting facts, such as the emergence of 46-year-old Mike McCoy (profile) of Iowa as the 5th ranked player in the country. Should his recent performance continue, it will be hard for USA Walker Cup coach Buddy Marucci to pass up the experience of McCoy when he is putting his team together to compete at Merion this September. McCoy’s performance over the past 12 months has been a model of consistency. In 2008 he won the Trans Miss, got to the round-of-32 in the U.S. Amateur, and was a semi-finalist in the U.S. Mid-Am. This year he finished 2nd in the Azalea Amateur, 6th at the Jones Cup (looked at as a Walker Cup preview) and most recently 2nd at the Coleman, one stroke behind Gene Elliott, who also hails from West Des Moines.
In addition to being constantly updated on www.golfweek.com, top players in the GolfWeek/amateurgolf.com Men’s Amateur Rankings will be listed each month in the Scoreboard section of Golfweek Magazine.