(Daytona Beach, Florida – August 23, 2007)- The Rolex Rankings Board and Technical Committee have today announced modifications to the process for calculating the Strength of Field for weekly Rolex Rankings.
The modification will be implemented for the August 27, 2007, Rolex Rankings release.
Since the inception of the Rolex Rankings in 2006, Strength of Field has been based on two values: World Points value and Home Tour Points value.
The modified system announced today will continue using the two values, however, the Home Tour values will be modified to reflect values for the top-30 players in the field from the previous year’s tour money list/order of merit instead of the top-50 players.
In addition, Home Tour Points will change from a maximum of 200 points to a maximum of 75 points or 75 percent value of World Points value, which ever is lower.
“With the reduction in Home Tour value, the weekly Strength of Field for each tour will place greater emphasis on a player’s ranking in the Rolex Rankings rather than on her previous season’s Home Tour performance,” said Chris Higgs, chairman of the Rolex Rankings Technical Committee.
“We constantly review the process for calculating Rolex Rankings to ensure we have the strongest system in place to recognize the best players in the world and who they compete against on a weekly basis.
“This modification will identify and award a more equitable value to those fields that have a greater concentration of top Rolex Rankings players.”
Rolex Rankings share the established men’s world rankings philosophy of awarding points based on field strength and evaluates player performances over a rolling two-year period weighted in favour of the current year with even more importance placed on the most recent 13 weeks.
The Rolex Rankings is the first-ever world rankings system for women’s golf sanctioned by the five major women’s professional golf tours: Ladies European Tour (LET); the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA); Ladies Professional Golfers’ Association of Japan (LPGA of Japan); Korea Ladies Professional Golf Association (KLPGA); Australian Ladies Professional Golf (ALPG); as well as the Ladies Golf Union (LGU), which administers the RICOH Women’s British Open. The Rolex Rankings are the only women’s world rankings that incorporate player performances from the five major tours and the Duramed Futures Tour, the official developmental tour of the LPGA. R2IT, an independent software development company, developed the software for the Rolex Rankings and maintains the Rolex Rankings on a weekly basis.
