The Skill Tee System

A PERSONAL POSITION PAPER

Why Golf Should Be Played From the Yardage You Hit, Not the Tee You're Handed

Forty-Five Years on and Around the Golf Course — What Golfers Have Shown Me, Told Me, and Taught Me

This is not a theoretical paper. It is the consolidated position of everyone I have played with, competed against, coached, and spoken to since I picked up a golf club in 1980-81 — juniors, club champions, weekend golfers, ageing members, powerful women players, and everyone in between. Their frustrations, told to me across four and a half decades of fairways, are the foundation of what follows.

Romit Bose

ROMITBOSEGOLF

Executive Summary

I have been on a golf course, in some capacity, for forty-five years — first as a young player finding my own game in 1980-81, later as a professional on tour and then as Coach to multiple Amateur National Champions of India in both Amateur and Junior ranks, Multiple Professional Tournament winners on the Pro Tours, innumerable junior golfers who have represented the country on the Natioanl and International stages and won tiltles including the World Teen and European Championships , teaching programs like the junior training programme at Delhi Golf Club through its formative years 1999–2010 and then at the Qutab Golf Club since 2010 and development of my RBG CHAMPIONS GOLF High performance coaching and development program, member of the founding staff of the National Golf Academy of India, Country Head for TrackMan spearheading their introduction in the Indian golf eco system in India from 2014-18, setup Indias first Golf Science & Performance academy at Classic Golf & Country Club and Tarudhan Valley, Siri Fort, currently am the elected President of the PGA of India driving coach education at the highest level and representing leading golf brands as their brand ambassador, All of this gave me a regular presence around junior and club golf across the country.

In that time I have stood on tees with children hitting it 90 yards and with scratch players hitting it 300, with club champions in their physical prime and with members well into their seventies still trying to play the same tee marker they used forty years earlier. I have listened to every version of the same complaint, from every kind of golfer.

What follows is not an abstract policy proposal. It is my own considered position, built from thousands of rounds watched, thousands of swings measured on a launch monitor, and countless conversations with golfers who felt they were being asked to play a course that was never built for them. I believe the game has been organising its tees around the wrong question for far too long — asking who a golfer is (their age, their gender, their category) instead of what a golfer can actually do (how far they hit the ball, today).

The SKILL TEE SYSTEM I am proposing here replaces that question, and I am convinced — from everything I have seen and heard across this journey — that it is the single most meaningful structural change we could make to the fairness, pace, and physical sustainability of the sport.

1. What I Have Seen From the First Tee, for Forty-Five Years

From the very first years I played this game, I noticed something that never sat right with me. On any given day at any club, the tee marker I was sent to told me almost nothing useful about the golfer standing next to me.

I have teed off alongside members who could carry it 300 yards and members who struggled to reach 200, both of us labelled simply as playing the "men's tees."

I have watched junior girls from my own academy who could out-drive grown men by thirty yards, still being ushered toward the forward markers by well-meaning club staff simply because of their age and gender, not their measured distance.

▪     In my years coaching, I coached juniors who were physically stronger than club members twice their age, yet the tee sheet never once asked what they could actually do — only how old they were.

▪     As TrackMan India's Country Head from 2014-18 and user of this leading technology for the last 12 years, I have measured the driver distances of women golfers who outhit the average club member by a considerable margin, and yet found them defaulting, out of habit and convention, to tees built for someone hitting sixty or eighty yards less.

Every one of these mismatches tells me the same thing: the label on a tee box describes who someone is, not what they can do. Across forty-five years I have not found a single good golfing reason for that to continue.

2. What Shorter Hitters Have Told Me — and Why They Are Wrong to Feel That Way

If there is one conversation I have had more than any other in my coaching life, it is this one. A player — often a promising junior, sometimes a grown club member — is moved to a forward tee suited to their actual distance, and I watch their shoulders drop.

They feel like I have just told them their game is not good enough. I have had juniors ask me, almost pleadingly, to be allowed to "play from the men's tees like everyone else," as though the tee marker were a badge of standing rather than a measurement of distance.

Every time I have had this conversation, I have told the player the same thing: I am not giving you a shorter golf course. I am giving you the same course everyone else is already playing.

I explain it to them the way I have come to understand it myself after decades of watching both ends of the yardage spectrum: a golfer driving it 280 yards on a 400-yard hole is left with a comfortable wedge into a green built to receive exactly that shot.

A golfer driving it 230 yards on that same tee is left fighting a long iron into a green that was never designed to hold that shot.

Move that 230-yard player to the tee where they, too, face a wedge approach, and I have simply given them back the golf course everyone else gets to play — not a lesser one. I have seen this reframing change minds, and egos, more consistently than any statistic I could quote.

3. What My TrackMan Data and My Eyes Have Told Me About Approach Shots

Working with the TrackMan for as long as I have, I have measured launch angles, spin rates, and landing trajectories for players across every level imaginable. What the data confirms is exactly what I had already suspected from simply standing behind thousands of approach shots over the years: a green is built by its architect to receive a specific class of shot, almost always a short-to-mid iron for the standard men's or women's tee at a given hole.

▪     I have watched countless shorter-hitting golfers, forced into a long-iron or hybrid approach they should never have had to play, land the ball with a shallow, low-spin trajectory that releases straight through the green — into bunkers or rough the architect never intended them to encounter.

▪     I have watched the same golfers, given the correct tee and left with a short iron in hand, hold greens and find far more proximity to the pin — not because their swing improved overnight, but because I had simply put the right club, and the right shot, back into their hands.

Nothing has convinced me of the soundness of distance-based tees more than watching this pattern repeat, year after year, across every level of player I have worked with.

4. What Pace of Play Has Taught Me, as a Player, a Coach, and a Tournament organiser

I have wasted more hours than I care to count standing on tee boxes waiting for the group ahead, and  I saw this play out over and over again. A golfer hitting 175-yard drives, sent off a tee built for a 300-yard hitter, is not just posting a worse score — they are adding shot after shot that was never necessary, and every one of those shots costs the group behind them real, measurable time.

▪     I have personally watched groups fall thirty and forty minutes behind schedule because one or two players in that group were simply playing a golf course that did not match their distance — not because of slow routines, but because they needed extra shots the hole was never going to let them avoid.

▪     I have also been in the group behind, hitting it well over 275 yards off the tee, standing and waiting through no fault of my own, watching my own rhythm and score suffer because of a structural mismatch that had nothing to do with anyone's golfing ability.

Having stood on both sides of that wait, I do not think this is a minor inconvenience. I consider it one of the clearest, most fixable causes of slow play in the sport today.

5. What I Have Learned, Watching My Own Body and the Bodies of Golfers I Have Coached

Golf is a rotational sport, and I have coached and played alongside enough golfers now moving into their fifties, sixties, and seventies to have seen, up close, what a round full of unnecessary full-effort swings does to a back, a hip, or a knee. Every extra shot a mis-tee'd golfer is forced to play is another full swing their body did not need to take.

▪     I have coached senior members who, kept on tees too long for their current distance, were taking two or three extra full swings a hole simply to reach — and told me afterwards how much their back or hip felt it the next morning.

▪     I have equally seen how much smoother, and how much less physically taxing, a round becomes the moment a golfer is playing the club the hole actually calls for — a short iron into a green built to receive it, rather than a long iron pressed beyond its natural range.

I do not say this only as a coach observing others. I say it as a golfer who has felt, in my own body over these forty-five years, exactly how much a single unnecessary full swing can cost by the end of eighteen holes.

6. What Golfers Have Told Me, Year After Year, About Losing Their Distance

Of every complaint I have heard in forty-five years around this game, none has been repeated to me more often, or more mournfully, than some version of: "I used to carry it 260, I'm lucky to get 220 now."

I have heard it from club champions well past their competitive prime, from weekend golfers in their sixties, and, more than once, from men and women managing a bad back, a replaced hip, or a troublesome knee. Almost every one of them says it as though it were a personal failure — a lost touch, a swing gone wrong.

I have never believed that, and I tell every one of them the same thing: what they are describing is physiology, not failure. Rotational strength, hip and shoulder flexibility, and joint health decline gradually from the late thirties onward, and can decline sharply overnight after an injury, at any age.

What I find indefensible is not that distance declines — that is simply part of getting older in a rotational sport — but that so many of these golfers are still expected to play from the very tee they used in their physical prime, on a course now set up for a swing speed they no longer have.

I have said this to golfer after golfer over the years: losing distance with age is physiology, not failure. Being made to keep playing the tee built for the distance you no longer have — that is the actual problem, and I believe it is entirely fixable.

What I have also seen, just as clearly, is that age tells you almost nothing on its own. I have coached and played alongside sixty-year-olds who, through conditioning and care, still carry it 250 yards and belong on a tee well forward of what their birth certificate would suggest. I have known others of exactly the same age, managing a hip replacement or a chronic back issue, now hitting it 170 and playing an entirely harder, mismatched course if left on the marker they used in their forties.

I do not think age should ever decide a tee. Only current, measured distance should — re-tested as a golfer's body changes, in either direction, without a single question asked about how old they are.

7. The System I Am Proposing, Built From Everything I Have Learned

Having watched this same pattern play out for forty-five years — across juniors, club members, competitive amateurs, and golfers well into their senior years —

I have arrived at a system I believe should replace gender- and age-labelled tees entirely: THE SKILL TEE SYSTEM, organised first and only by measured driving and approach-shot distance, with handicaps then calculated within each distance tier.

Tee Tier	Typical Driver Distance	Typical 7-Iron Distance	Indicative Course Yardage (Par 72)
Tier 1 (Elite)	275+ yds	165+ yds	6,900 – 7,400 yds
Tier 2 (Advanced)	240 – 274 yds	150 – 164 yds	6,400 – 6,800 yds
Tier 3 (Intermediate)	200 – 239 yds	125 – 149 yds	5,800 – 6,300 yds
Tier 4 (Developing)	150 – 199 yds	95 – 124 yds	5,000 – 5,700 yds
Tier 5 (Junior / Entry)	Under 150 yds	Under 95 yds	3,800 – 4,900 yds

Table 1: Indicative Skill Tee tiers, drawn from the ranges I have most commonly measured and observed across the golfers I have worked with. Exact yardages should be calibrated per course, based on hole design, elevation, and altitude, and re-measured periodically as a golfer's distances change.

Two principles matter to me more than any other in this framework, because I have seen what happens when they are ignored:

▪     Distance is the only entry criterion. A sixteen-year-old, a fifty-five-year-old, and a thirty-year-old woman who all average 230-yard drives should play the same tee. I have seen enough mismatches caused by gender and age labels to be certain neither belongs anywhere near this decision.

▪     Handicap is calculated within tier, not across it. Once tee assignment is settled by distance, I believe each golfer's handicap should be established relative to the scoring difficulty of their own tee, preserving fair competition between golfers who share a tee but differ in short game, putting, and course management — the things I have always believed actually separate good golfers from great ones.

This two-step separation, distance first and skill handicap second, is what I believe finally allows the game to be fair on physical output and fair on golfing skill at the same time — something I have never seen a single gendered or age-based tee achieve in forty-five years of looking.

8. What Forty-Five Years of Handicaps Have Taught Me — and How This System Closes the Door on Sandbagging

Sandbagging is not new to me. I have watched it in every era of the game I have played and coached in — a golfer quietly nursing their handicap upward before a CLUB LEAGUE OR CORPORATE MEMBER-GUEST event, under-hitting on purpose in rounds that do not matter, or choosing an easier tee on a Tuesday and a harder one only when a card is going to count. I have sat close enough to enough handicap committees, and heard enough clubhouse suspicion over the years, to know how little most clubs can actually do about it once they suspect it.

Sandbagging survives because the handicap system runs on a single input: the score a golfer chooses to submit. There is nothing else to check it against. A player can manage that one number quite easily, and clubs are left relying on reputation and rumour rather than evidence.

What I have come to believe, having watched the same distance-based logic work at the junior level for years before proposing it here for every golfer, is that the Skill Tee System closes this gap almost as a side effect of solving something else entirely. Because tee tier is set by a measured, physical number — driving distance from a launch monitor or a verified sample of on-course drives — it becomes a second, independent data point sitting alongside the handicap.

A golfer can manage a scorecard. I have never once seen a golfer talk a TrackMan unit into reading a number it did not measure.

I have watched what happens once a club has two numbers to look at instead of one. A golfer's measured distance and their handicap trend should move together. When I have seen them pull apart — a handicap dropping sharply while the distance behind it has not moved at all — that gap becomes something a committee can finally point to, instead of a suspicion nobody can prove.

It also ends one of the oldest habits I have watched in club golf: tee-shopping — playing an easier tee when nothing is on the line and a harder one only when it suits the card. Under the Skill Tee System, tier is fixed by measurement, not chosen round to round, so that particular game disappears on its own.

There is a wider benefit here too, one I did not fully appreciate until I had watched it happen many times over: once every golfer is playing the tee that actually matches their distance, the scores feeding the handicap system stop being distorted by an approach shot that was never reachable in the first place. A cleaner scorecard makes a fairer handicap for every golfer at the club, not only the one somebody suspected of sandbagging.

9. How I Believe This Should Be Implemented

▪     Measurement: use launch-monitor sessions — TrackMan or equivalent, the tool I have relied on for years to tell me the truth about a swing — or a minimum sample of verified on-course drives, to place golfers into a tier; re-test annually or whenever a golfer's distance changes materially, whether from injury, a growth spurt, a change in equipment, or simply the gradual decline in strength and flexibility that comes with age.

▪     Tee marking: mark tees by tier number and yardage, not by "men's/ladies'/senior" labelling, so the system reads, and feels, like a performance ladder rather than a demographic one — this single change in language is something I have found matters enormously to how golfers receive it.

▪     Score cards and course rating: issue a course and slope rating per tier so handicaps remain portable and compliant with national federation standards.

▪     Club and event rollout: I would introduce this voluntarily at member level first, through junior and senior programmes, where I have found the fairness gain is most visible and the resistance lowest, before extending it to open club competitions.

▪     Communication: frame every conversation around what I have learned in Sections 3 through 6 — approach angle, pace of play, joint health, and the honest physiology of ageing — rather than around "shorter tees." I have found, over and over, that the framing is what determines whether a golfer experiences this change as a gift or as a slight.

Conclusion

I did not arrive at this position from a policy document or a committee room.

I arrived at it from forty-five years of standing on tee boxes and driving ranges watching millions of golfshots, watching swings, measuring distances, and listening to golfers of every age and background tell me, in their own words, that something about the way we assign tees has never quite felt fair.

I believe this is the consolidated position of every golfer who has ever wanted the honest chance to play their best game, from a tee that actually matches what they can do today.

Golf already accepts that clubs, shafts, and ball compression should be fitted to the individual. After everything I have seen and heard across this journey, I am convinced it is time the tee itself was treated the same way.

Correct tee placement does not shorten anyone's golf course. It gives every golfer the course everyone else is already playing — and that, to me, after forty-five years in this game, is simply fairness.