This is the 20th year The Dallas Morning News has published Texas Golf, and we continue to make changes based on feedback from club pros, players, course officials and other readers.

For Texas Golf 2008, 87 panel members voted. Fifty-two are from what is considered the Northern Texas PGA section, and 35 are from the area represented by the Southern Texas PGA. These panel members are professionals, competitive amateurs, superintendents, architects, journalists and others in the golf industry. We are conscious of trying to maintain a geographic balance of voters and including women in the process. The vast majority of panel members are low handicappers.

This year, 11 women voted. Two of them, Carolyn Creekmore and Toni Wiesner, have won major national events.

We have doubled the number of courses we rank to 100. For those who noted that our list of best courses is dominated by private courses, we have a list of the 50 best courses you can play and four other rankings of 100 courses open to the public based on price.

We contacted all the public courses on our ballot in January and asked the cost of a greens fee and cart on a Saturday morning during prime time. Some call that rate the "rack rate." As with a hotel, you don't always pay the "rack rate," but getting that rate puts all the courses on a common ground.

From a list of 280 18-hole courses, voters ranked courses they have played on a 10-point scale. There were no restrictions on the number of 10s they could give.

To qualify for the 100 Best Courses list, a course had to have received votes from 25 percent (22) of the panel members. The rankings are determined by the course's average score after "winsorization." Winsorization is a mathematical process that adjusts scores outside of the range of the majority of the scores.