Long open prairie course example
SSA alone cannot tell you the difficulty of a course. Courses can have a high SSA if they are designed with lots of par 4 and 5 holes, but that does not necessarily make them difficult. All that a high SSA tells you is that it will take many shots to complete the course.
SSA is directly related to length, so just having a high SSA doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a more difficult course; it may just mean that it’s longer. To determine difficulty SSA needs to be compared to par.
A course on a huge totally wide open field illustrates this. If course A was flat and on a very large grass field with NO trees or foliage it could have holes over 1000 ft. (Imagine California Trail in Olathe KS on steroids.) With no foliage and no elevation differential a hole of 1100 ft. has an SSA of 4.6. A course with 18 of these holes would be 19,800 ft. long and have an SSA of 83. It would have a very high SSA but that doesn’t mean that it is particularly difficult; it’s just long. These holes must be par 5s, they could not be par 4 holes, so total par is 90. Since the SSA is 7.2 throws under par, on average Gold level players will have over 7 birdies per round. This could not be called a difficult course.
If course B with the same hole lengths had every hole with slightly increased foliage of “Stands”, then the hole score avg jumps to 5.3 for an SSA of 95. Now, on average, Gold level players will make 5 bogeys per round. The course length is identical, but clearly course B is more difficult.