During last month’s Players Championship, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan outlined moves the circuit plans to take to address pace of play, a hot-button topic according to the Fan Forward initiative.
Players learned more about those adjustments in this month’s “GreenSheet,” which was sent to Tour members earlier this week.
The Tour has established a “Speed of Play Working Group,” which includes Sam Burns, Adam Schenk and Jhonattan Vegas. It will work with the Player Advisory Council on pace-of-play improvements, and this week’s memo encouraged players to contact members of the working group “if you have any ideas you would like discussed.”
As Monahan outlined at TPC Sawgrass, the Tour will experiment with the use of distance-measuring devices at tournaments played between the Masters and PGA Championship.
The Tour will also begin testing a new policy at the Lecom Suncoast Classic on the Korn Ferry Tour later this month, and it’s already started on the PGA Tour Americas. The adjustment will remove what has essentially been a warning for a “bad time” and will now apply a one-stroke penalty for a “first offense.”
“[The test] will allow us to gather data to help determine if this measure would change player behavior and have a positive impact on pace of play,” the memo read.
Monahan also announced a plan to begin “publishing speed-of-play-related statistics later this season,” but there were no additional details in this month’s GreenSheet. According to Tour officials, the exact data the circuit plans to release is still being developed.
