01 Publisher
This guide is published by a private individual, in a personal and non-commercial capacity. It is not a business, sells nothing, takes no advertising and accepts no sponsored placement.
Written correspondence is by email: contact@hailridgegolf.com. There is no contact form, no telephone line and no mailing list, because a static guide does not need any of them.
02 How the chapters are written
Each chapter is written to answer one question, and every claim in it falls into one of three categories, which the text tries to keep visibly separate:
- Rules and definitions, which come from the published texts of the governing bodies and are reported as they stand.
- Measured findings, such as make rates by distance or the share of the scoring gap attributable to approach play, which are attributed to the body of work they come from and described as approximate where they are.
- Teaching rules of thumb, such as carry and roll ratios, which are labelled as estimates and always paired with an instruction to measure your own.
Pages carry the date they were last reviewed. A review means the whole page was read again against its sources, not that a word was changed. Terms defined anywhere in the guide are collected in the glossary, so that a definition only has to be written once.
03 What the pages rely on
The rules chapters follow the Rules of Golf and the Rules of Handicapping as published jointly by the United States Golf Association and The R&A, together with the equipment standards those two bodies maintain. Those documents are revised periodically, and they always take precedence over any summary, including this one.
The scoring and statistics sections draw on published shot tracking data and on the strokes gained framework developed by Mark Broadie. The technique chapters rely on measurements published by launch monitor manufacturers and on established teaching practice, and they say which is which.
Where a course, a competition or a local committee has its own rules, those govern. No page here should be treated as an authority in a competition; the card in your pocket and the current rule book are.
04 Privacy and hosting
These pages are plain static files. There is no analytics script, no advertising script, no embedded video, no web font loaded from elsewhere, and no cookie set by this site. Nothing you read here is recorded by the author, because there is nothing here capable of recording it.
The files are served by Cloudflare Pages, a static hosting service operated by Cloudflare, Inc., San Francisco, California. Like any web host, it processes the technical request data required to deliver a page and to protect the service, under its own terms.
If you write to the contact address, your message and your email address exist only in that mailbox, are used only to reply, and are not added to any list.
05 Copyright and reuse
The text and the diagrams on this site are the author's own work and remain the author's property. Quoting a paragraph with a link back is welcome and needs no permission. Republishing a whole chapter does need permission, which is usually given if you ask.
Rule texts, ratings systems and equipment standards referred to in these pages remain the property of the bodies that publish them, and are described here rather than reproduced.
06 Corrections
If something here is wrong, out of date, or unclear, write to contact@hailridgegolf.com and say which page and which paragraph. Corrections of fact are made promptly and the review date on the page is updated when they are.
Rules questions about a specific situation in a specific competition are best put to the committee running it, which is the only body that can answer them properly.