The holiday season is about giving thanks and reconnecting with the people you love, but before you do that, you need to take a hard look at the golf season that just passed. This is the third year of my season-end self-assessment known as the Golf Competence Achievement & Reward Test (aka the Golf CART™), which attempts to provide a holistic view of your golf experience over the past 12 months.
The Golf CART isn’t an official metric, and we’re not yet at the point where you’d brag about your score at holiday parties. Then again, maybe you should, because the CART aspires to be a more accurate reflection of your golf season than just a bunch of numbers on a scorecard.
As usual, we will outline how it works and provide some examples from the staff below. The CART becomes even more helpful when comparing your CART score from one year to the next. It also works as an isolated snapshot, though, so if this is your first time taking it, don’t worry.
One last thing, as usual, CART scoring is entirely subjective. We’re not asking how well you drove the ball compared to Rory McIlroy, but how you did on a scale only you can determine. This will all make sense when you read on below, so let’s get to it.
The system is simple. There are 10 categories in which you grade yourself on a 1-5 scale. A 5 is exceptional for you, 4 is above average, 3 is average, 2 is below average, 1 is absolute crap. Again, the benchmark here is your level, so it helps to compare this year to the one or two years prior.
The CART™ doesn’t dispute that much of our golf satisfaction is tied to how well we execute in specific areas, but we wanted to probe deeper than the typical ball-striking and putting statistics used elsewhere. All of these questions are meant to assess whether you feel you’ve made tangible progress in areas that influence your golf experience.
While this is primarily an assessment of your driving proficiency, it extends elsewhere. Were your good drives leaving you shorter distances into greens? Could you carry ambitious hazards more or less than before? While it’s possible to have ample clubhead speed and not be a good golfer, trust me: a power deficiency tends to seep into your performance and your enjoyment over the balance of a season.
2. Full-swing reliability
You could measure a swing’s efficacy any number of ways, but a telling gauge is this: How comfortable are you with a 7-iron in your hand to hit a moderate-sized target? We’re not talking about attacking pins, but compared to the year prior, do you feel better about that shot, worse or about the same?
3. Short-game versatility
A good short game is about much more than your ability to hit a standard chip, but your adaptability in certain situations—tight lies, heavy rough, a bunker shot over a high lip. Another way to frame it: You miss a green and are not sure what sort of shot you will face as you approach your ball. How big is the pit in your stomach?
4. Putts you shouldn’t make
Similar to speed or lag putting, this mainly reflects your ability to leave yourself gimmes or even hole a few from significant distances. By the way, if you’re wondering what counts as a putt you shouldn’t make, check out our How Do You Compare? interactive. The answer is basically everything.
A pretty simple way to think about this: You lag your first putt to three feet. Do you welcome the chance to sink the next one, or are you praying your opponent says it’s good? Fair or not, the shortest shots risk sticking with you the longest.
A conceit for all the golf we play at this level is that the stakes are fairly low. But even there, I believe our golf can be divided into two categories—our regular rounds, and the “big” ones.
6. The Regular Season (aka “The Joe’ Scale”)
I play a pretty standard game with the same group of guys, one of whom is my rival/neighbor/friend/tormentor Joe. Joe is nothing if not a decent benchmark for the state of my own game, hence why I’m unofficially referring to this as the “Joe Scale.” Broadly, the question is how you fared in what you considered “regular rounds.” Was your best golf better, and your worst golf less awful? Did you flirt with any benchmark rounds, or did you regress? Did you beat your version of Joe more than you lost to him?
In a Low Net world, the majors are those rounds where you at least make sure you have enough tees and balls without scuff marks in your bag: club championships, member-guests, buddies trips with a pre-arranged format. These are the rounds that “matter” the most, which means they’re still insignificant, but we obsess about them anyway.
While you might think rewards and achievement are similar, they’re actually not. One of the Low Net principles is that golf is sometimes fun, but always rewarding in how it teaches us about ourselves and presents new challenges. So here, the rewards are the extent that golf shaped you this year, the outlet it provided, and the connections and memories it forged.
The first part of this is simple: Did you play enough golf? Or did life get in the way? But it’s also about the quality of golf you played, because I’d argue your meaningful golf quotient should depend heavily on your ability to extract value from a wide assortment of occasions—from bucket list trips to six-round loops at dusk. The best golf years create the bold-faced memories, but also a sufficient number of delightful little moments in between.
9. Work-Life Realities (aka “Divorce/Unemployment Scale”)
The counterbalance to playing enough meaningful golf is something else could be suffering. Did golf lead to unrest at home? Did you blow off too much work? The CART™ contends that a great golf year should not come at too great an expense of other aspects of life. Welcome scenario: The golf you play is time well spent, which alleviates the stress from work, which allows you to be more present with your family. Another scenario: You played a lot of golf, but no one really seemed to notice. This is the toughest one to gauge, and frankly hinges on more than just you.
The nature of your golf season is going to linger even after you stop playing (although I make an argument here why you should keep going). Put simply: What was your golf mood this year? While frustration is inevitable, did you still walk away excited about your golf future? Are you looking forward to building on a successful foundation this offseason, or at least motivated to address what held you back? Do you mostly welcome a break? At any point recently have you looked into buying a boat?
41-50: A career year. Don’t change a thing.
31-40: A promising year, plenty to build on.
21-30: Worth reviewing what you’d do differently next year.
20 & below: Maybe the boat isn’t such a bad idea.
Once again we canvassed Golf Digest staffers for their assessment and, once again, the CART scores are scattered among ability levels. Some of our best golfers had frustrating seasons, and some of our higher-handicapped players came away thrilled. Then again, the two players who had exceptionally (and obnoxiously?) high scores could also point to significant victories, so it’s not like winning doesn’t matter.
Joel Beall (26): In January, I took an iron to my right shoulder blade from a teenager making a baseball swing in the stall next to me. The season did not improve from there.
Sam Weinman (31): They say happiness is tied to expectations, and it’s fair to say I fell short of mine this season, at least in terms of consistency tee to green. Then again, the game still provided me some indelible memories with friends, family and strangers, and I enter the winter unreasonably excited for 2026. I really should know better.
Greg Gottfried (32): I’ve honestly never felt better about my golf game, which is a low bar, but we’ll take it. I’m driving the ball semi-consistently and making more ridiculous putts than should be feasibly possible. There’s obviously still a lot to improve, especially with the short game, and yet, I feel like I’m on the right track.
Jared Goldstein (32): One Tuesday, I played my best round in years. That Thursday, I was playing so shockingly poorly that one of my playing partners literally hugged me as we made the turn. Such is life for someone who’s playing less golf than ever. I had a couple big achievements on the course this year, including in my mental game. I’m fine with 2025 being over but still looking forward to 2026.
E. Michael Johnson (32): My distance fell off a cliff and my iron game struggled to the point where I was more confident hitting a green with a 9-wood than a 7-iron. Plus, I can’t recall making a bomb on the greens all year. That said, my short game saved me enough to where I was a handy partner, picking up a win in the member-member and a runner-up in the member-guest. Despite the increased amount of sucking, the reply to “Want to play Saturday?” continues to be yes. Sunday, too.
Keely Levins (35): I signed up for the state am and played three tournament rounds for the first time in 12 years. I dedicated the snippets of time I have outside of work and parenting to parts of my game that I’d been ignoring. I wasn’t sure how I’d react to the nerves and unrelenting grind that is tournament golf. But I loved it, and I missed it. It motivated me to look more sharply at what needs work next. I’m excited, yet realistic about the amount of time I can actually spend on my game.
Christopher Powers (35): Some slight tweaks allowed me to regain the power I thought I had all but lost over the last few years. Last year, I reached my career-low handicap of 5.2, but I did it with smoke and mirrors. I ballooned to a 7.9 in 2025 and, as insane as this sounds, had a much better season overall. The mental health boost of having pitching wedge into certain greens, as opposed to 6- and 7-irons, cannot be understated. Of course, with the return of booming drives came a regression in my all-world short game, which reared its ugly head in the small handful of “majors” I played in 2025. Looking forward to cleaning that up in 2026.
Alex Myers (45): The best year of my golf life, I matched Rory McIlroy by winning our own green jacket and added a green belt by winning another buddies golf trip. But there were plenty of other highlights, including a career-low round, a career-low handicap index, a first trip to the fantastic Forest Dunes and nearly 50 rounds played (if you count a few fun scrambles), by far my most as a dad. And all that after starting the year by doing physical therapy on a torn shoulder labrum. Heroic stuff, really. My hope is to avoid a serious offseason injury for a third consecutive year—and to find a way to keep this momentum going into 2026!
Patrick Andrews (45): This was my best year of golf yet. It started back in March with the first of hopefully many future buddies trips and finished with Seitz Cup and Match Play wins at Golf Digest in October. I got to play some fantastic courses, and more importantly got to play with even better people. As for my game, I saw my scoring average and handicap get to career lows. My driver got better, my iron play got more consistent, and my short game tightened up. I still need to work on my putter, specifically in that 5- to 10-foot range. Definitely left a few out there. Next year has a lot to live up to. Spring needs to get here fast.
