Managing your Golf Competitions

from Vietnam Golf Magazine

October 2015

www.vietnamgolfmagazine.net

For those who organize golf competitions, they know how time-consuming the effort can be.  From maintaining information for registered golfers, to organizing teams and flights, to properly recording scores and calculating results, it can be a rather tedious task.

A management system would simplify the process, making it easier to develop and maintain a competition. Whether it’s a multi-round member-guest tournament, a club championship, corporate or charity outing, well-designed software solution would ease setup, administration and scoring.

Data Administration:

Vietnam Golf Magazine
October 2015

The tournament organizer would be able to build and maintain an event database that includes golfers names and contact details, gender, cart/walk preference, caddy preference and preferred tee times.  This information would accessable for current and future tournaments.

More sophisticated capabilities would store each golfer’s pairing history from past tournaments in order to avoid pairing the same golfers together too frequently. The system could be set ensure that no repeat pairings would be guaranteed. It would also the organizer to automatically avoid pairing husbands and wives together.  

A golfer’s score history should be accessible to the organizer to allow for a comparison between friendly rounds and tournament scores.  For some golfers, their competition scores are considerably lower than their casual rounds, which can lead to a disproportionate number of tournament wins.  Weighting a tournament score more significantly in the golfer’s handicap would help provide a more even playing field.

Pairing Teams - Creating Flights:

One of the significant benefits of tournament software is in the flighting of golfers and creation of teams, previously a very long and tedious task.   Remembering back to the mid-1980s, with the first tournament system I installed in Tennessee, USA….

The director of golf had frequently organized 4-player scrambles.  Each foursome would have an A,B,C,D player in each to maintain equal team handicaps.   In organising the teams, they would write the golfer’s name and handicap on separate sheets of paper.  The second step would be to group the golfers into four stacks based on handicap.  The time-consuming step then began, when they would take a golfer out of each stack in an effort to create the most evenly balanced teams.  After a half-day or overnight, they finally had their evenly matched teams.

With a software solution, the A-B-C-D teams were sorted at the touch of a button, and most likely more evenly paired than through the manual process.   In the first ever use of the tournament software, the final results ended in a four-team tie for first which amazed the Director of Golf.   In his 20-years prior to that, he never even had two teams tied for first.  The software sort provided teams so evenly matched that four teams finished with the lowest score.

Along with the sorting and creation of teams, the system would also save significant time in generating hole assignments, creating flights, scorecards, cart signs and scoreboards.  A Starter Sheet would also be available with tee times displayed for different tournaments formats including regular, shotgun, and crossover.

Scoring & Results:  

Advanced systems should put hole-by-hole scoring into the hands of the golfer with real time wireless scoring.  With almost every golfer in today’s world using a smartphone, web-based technology allows the club to reduce the time needed to manually enter scores by passing this task to the golfer.

Additional benefits from the real-time scoring is that the players and non-players alike will be engaged with an ability to view a live leaderboard from anywhere on the course or around the world.  A chat feature can be enabled, allowing golfers to interact with other participants.

An added benefit of this feature for tournament organizers is the ability to monitor pace of play and view how many holes each group has remaining.

With the advances in golf tournament software, the organizers are able to cut a significant amount of time from processing and managing data, while adding benefit to both golfers and interested non-participants.