How can I find out which nines were used on a course in a past PGA tournament?

[Tedeward]

I am doing research that requires several statistics from the LPGA tour from 1999 to around 2004. One such statistic I need is a measure of course difficulty for each tournament. I am familiar with Slope and USGA ratings, but does anyone know of any other metric I could use? Slope rating would be best, but the problem is that these are old tournaments. When I go to the USGA website (https://ncrdb.usga.org/NCRDB/NCRListing.aspx) and enter the course used for a tournament, I often need to know which nines were used in the tournament since this will change the difficulty. In many cases I can find out which nines were used with a quick google, but not in all cases. For example, the Australian Ladies Masters in 2000 was played at Royal Pines Resort, but this resort has three nines: the Gold, Blue, Green courses. I have no way of knowing which two were used in order to determine the proper slope rating, and can't find info on this no matter how much I search online. Does anyone know of any way to find out which nines were used in past LPGA tournaments? Any website database? golfstats.com only provides the course name, unfortunately. I also need to know which tee location was used in each tournament in order to get the proper slope rating, so if this source provided that information as well that would be great. Or would it be safe to assume they used the farthest, and thus most difficult, tee spot? Thanks.

[iacas]

Good luck. With older tournaments, in general, the whole thing may have been redesigned from what we currently see at any particular course.

[allenc]

1 hour ago, Tedeward said:

I am doing research that requires several statistics from the LPGA tour from 1999 to around 2004. One such statistic I need is a measure of course difficulty for each tournament. I am familiar with Slope and USGA ratings, but does anyone know of any other metric I could use? Slope rating would be best, but the problem is that these are old tournaments. When I go to the USGA website (https://ncrdb.usga.org/NCRDB/NCRListing.aspx) and enter the course used for a tournament, I often need to know which nines were used in the tournament since this will change the difficulty. In many cases I can find out which nines were used with a quick google, but not in all cases. For example, the Australian Ladies Masters in 2000 was played at Royal Pines Resort, but this resort has three nines: the Gold, Blue, Green courses. I have no way of knowing which two were used in order to determine the proper slope rating, and can't find info on this no matter how much I search online. Does anyone know of any way to find out which nines were used in past LPGA tournaments? Any website database? golfstats.com only provides the course name, unfortunately. I also need to know which tee location was used in each tournament in order to get the proper slope rating, so if this source provided that information as well that would be great. Or would it be safe to assume they used the farthest, and thus most difficult, tee spot? Thanks.

They almost certainly did not use the farthest tees in an LPGA tournament.  If you could find out what the total distance they played from was, then use the course rating from a set of tees closest to that distance, you would be pretty close.

[Tedeward]

21 hours ago, allenc said:

They almost certainly did not use the farthest tees in an LPGA tournament.  If you could find out what the total distance they played from was, then use the course rating from a set of tees closest to that distance, you would be pretty close.

How do I go about relating distance to course rating? For example, according to Golfstats.com the ADT championship in 2001 was 6,413 yards on the Trump International course. USGA reports four different female tee locations ranging ratings from 71.0 to 76.9. How would I know which one it is?

[iacas]

1 minute ago, Tedeward said:

How do I go about relating distance to course rating? For example, according to Golfstats.com the ADT championship in 2001 was 6,413 yards on the Trump International course. USGA reports four different female tee locations ranging ratings from 71.0 to 76.9. How would I know which one it is?

There's a formula: http://www.gottagogolf.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/guidancechart.pdf?00e4cf

(I'd look for the official USGA one as I have no idea how old that one is.)

[jamo]

You could try calling the course. No guarantees, but you might get lucky and find someone at the pro shop who was around at the time and could tell you.