MOS is the one of the trickiest thing to define in today's Minigolf. It was invented to make it possible to both cover the new trends of artificial grass and cover the existing systems types around Europe and in USA which could not be classified as Felt, Miniature or Concrete. Everyone was at that time happy to have found a "wastebasket" to put all "strange" stuff in to make it possible for more countries to arrange official tournaments.

But soon problems with this strategy became really clear to me and others. The first strange thing that happened was that, in late 2006 in Sweden 14 (out of approximately 100) club owned Swedish Felt Courses was classified as MOS. The reason for this was that one or more lanes on that course where not among the 32 official lane types in the WMF rule-book. But since the Swedish Federation had approved them for playing on and quality assured them WMF chose to classify them as MOS instead of disapprove them totally. The wastebasket strategy was for the first time shown in practical decision.

I (together with the Swedish federation) don’t think a non-approved Felt, Concrete or Miniature course shall be possible to have classified as MOS at all. This will only lead to a situation where "everything" is MOS and we cannot control the development of this important part of our future sport. It’s a big risk that MOS will only be a "wastebasket" for the things that are not in the main stream Felt, Concrete and Miniature. We need to strict up the definitions so we can only have high quality MOS courses with clear ideas of how to play approved as MOS.

That's why Swedish Federation also in 2007 where submitting two motions to the WMF Delegates conference. The first motion was meant to make it impossible to classify a not WMF approved Felt, Concrete or Miniature course as MOS. The thinking behind it was two major rules:

1. That if more than half the lanes of a course can be classified as approved Felt, Concrete or Miniature lanes then the whole course can either be approved as a Felt, Concrete or Miniature or not be approved at all. Hence it cannot be approved as MOS.

2. Any MOS course shall have a consistent surface type over all its lanes so no mixture between different systems can be approved.

But also the Swedish Federation submitted another and maybe more important motion about the future of "the fifth element" of Minigolf, artificial grass. In Sweden and many other countries this is actually these courses represented a large majority of the growth of courses. The absolute majority is privately build and owned simply since private capital can smell the money in the investment. But some clubs are thinking of this and one club Askims BGK in Gothenburg, Sweden has already acted upon this trend. In my opinion this trend is to important for the Minigolf community to neglect and therefore we need clarify a few things.

1. We need to set the rules for what shall be approved as competition artificial grass courses, since not all that is build is suitable for competition (too much luck involved). This is important since our clubs that shall invest their money in a project needs to know that it will be possible to compete on their course.

2. We need to set some practical rules about the game since that will lead to that courses are design to achieve maximum attractants together with fairness and joy of playing as a professional Minigolf player.

The 6 rules suggested by the Swedish federation where:

1. Include a subsection in the WMF rulebook regarding MOS played on artificial grass
(furthermore referred to as MOS Grass). This do not mean another fifth surface,
since almost all general MOS rules will still be valid, but an identified and well
defined variant of MOS played on artificial Grass.

• MOS played on artificial Grass is very rapidly spreading across the northern parts of
Europe today. In Sweden there was about 10-20 courses built only last year. That
should be compared to less than five competition courses on the other three
surfaces (Felt, Concrete and Miniature) together. In less than 5 years MOS Grass
will be the dominant Minigolf type in Sweden if this development continues.

• Also this type of game is constructed to attract especially the 'stressed' golfers (in
Sweden there are 500.000 golfers) wanting to improve their putting but still
compete while they do it. Because of that we will find reasons for rules that do not
exist in today's Minigolf, otherwise the golfers will not feel at home and start will
not join the MOS Grass competing society as we hope they would like to do.

2. Allowing competitions played on 12 holes on MOS Grass:

• Many fine MOS Grass courses built today has only 12 holes. The reason for this is
usually to save money, use less space and reduce time for families to play a
round. Many of these MOS Grass courses are also good enough to compete on.
Today it's not possible to arrange an international tournament on a 12 holes
course. We would like to allow this and only include restriction for 18 holes when it
comes to International championships on MOS Grass.

3. Special obstacles and their moving ball rules (including penalty stroke in water
obstacle):

• In MOS Grass the following type of obstacles is allowed.
o Bunkers made of artificial grass. In those the ball shall be played as is after
moving from other boundaries according to the general rules of MOS. These
bunkers shall be coloured with white or grey colour.
o Bunkers made of sand. If the ball is placed in one of those bunkers it shall be
moved in the direction it came from according to the general rules.
o Water obstacles. If the ball is placed in a water obstacle it shall be moved in the
direction it came from according to the general rules. A major difference though
is that a penalty stroke shall be counted for ball placed in water. The penalty
stroke counts if the ball is more than half in water and lying still in water. A ball
bouncing in and out of water in the same stroke doesn't not imply into a penalty
stroke. Water penalty stroke on a lane cannot result in a score higher than 7 on
that lane.

4. Allowance for playing competitions on MOS Grass with approved golf ball without
WMF logo and license paid.

• This proposal is made so that golfers might use their equipment as is in a Minigolf
competition and not avoid joining the Minigolf society of this reason.

5. Using lane PAR on MOS Grass.

• All MOS Grass that will be approved for competition shall have all lanes stamped
with a PAR as well as a total PAR for the course. In general the PAR should be set
as the amount of strokes that is normally used to reach the green + one (1). No
PAR on a lane should be set higher than 4.

6. Ruff course boundaries.

• Longer grass called ruff or semi ruff with a width broader than 30 cm shall be
counted as course boundary even if no boundary (wall) is placed outside it.

General motivations:

We need these detailed rules to attract the golfers into our sport and also to set the standard on how a course
shall be designed and built to be a challenge for a competition player.

Both those motions were after pre discussions with WMF redrawn by the Swedish Federation. The TC promised to work in the spirit of these motions though. Until today nothing of these intentions has been shown by the TC.