A few weeks ago, a California golfer who asked to remain nameless received what he thought of as a “badge of dishonor.”
It appeared on his GHIN app, where he keeps track of his handicap index, in the form of something called a “soft cap.”
“It felt like someone out there didn’t trust me,” the golfer said.
That isn’t the intent.
“A soft cap is not meant to be a punishment of any sort,” said Lee Rainwater, director of handicapping education and outreach for the USGA. “Rather, it is a handicapping safeguard to insure that your (handicap index) represents your demonstrated ability.”
How, exactly, does it work?
True to its name, a soft cap is a mechanism that kicks in automatically to limit how quickly a golfer’s handicap index can increase. It is triggered when the difference between a player’s newly calculated index and their low handicap index (within 12 months of their most recent posted score) is greater than 3.0 strokes. In those cases, any increase over 3.0 is restricted to 50 percent of that rise. If, for instance, your low handicap index is 10.0 and your newly calculated number jumps to 14.0, or a 4 stroke increase, the soft cap will limit the increase to half of 1. Your handicap index, after the soft cap, will adjust to 13.5.
A soft cap is not the only kind of cap. There is also a safeguard called a hard cap, which limits any upward movement in a player’s handicap to a maximum of 5 strokes above their low handicap index.
By their very nature, soft caps and hard caps can deter sandbagging. But the intent behind them is not to target cheats.
They’re were designed with the vast majority of golfers in mind. Most golfers aren’t out to game the system. They want to keep an accurate record of their performance. Fact is, though, even the best players can suffer through a stretch of poor form during which they post a series of bad scores that don’t faithfully reflect their underlying ability.
That’s where automatic caps come in. They adjust for those aberrations.
In 2024, 21 percent of golfers were affected by the soft cap at some point during their season, and 1.5 percent were affected by the hard cap.
Getting capped, in other words, is not uncommon. If it happens to you, don’t think of it as a badge of dishonor. Think of it as the handicap system keeping up with how you really play.
Don’t have a handicap? You can start the process here.
