Practical guides for running the competition
Four things worth knowing if you run golf competitions, whether or not you ever use ScribbleScore. Written because we kept explaining them on calls.
How to photograph a scorecard so it can be read
Applies to any system that reads cards, including a person squinting at one on a Monday morning.
Get the light behind the card, not behind you
The single most common failure is glare, and it comes from photographing a card with a clubhouse window behind you. The light bounces off the paper straight into the lens and erases whatever is underneath it. Turn ninety degrees so the light falls across the card.
Flat, and all of it
Put the card down on the desk rather than holding it. A held card curls, and a curled card throws a shadow across the row you most need. Step back until every hole and the signature are inside the frame — a card is scored as a whole, and a crop that loses the back nine loses the competition.
Take it at the desk, not later
The best moment to photograph a card is while the person who wrote it is still standing in front of you. If anything is unreadable you can ask them, which takes fifteen seconds. Discovering it on Tuesday means a phone call, and a phone call means a member telling you what they think they shot.
Do not tidy the card first
Resist the urge to go over a faint number in your own pen. You have just created a card where two people's handwriting is mixed, and if the result is ever queried nobody can tell which digit was the player's. If a number is wrong, correct it in the system where the change is recorded against your name.
The clubhouse window is behind you. Turn ninety degrees so the light falls across the card instead of bouncing off it.
Three shots of the same card.
Handicap allowances, and why the format changes them
The number most often set once and then never revisited.
A handicap allowance is a percentage applied to each player's handicap before the competition is scored. It exists because different formats reward high handicaps differently, and a full allowance in the wrong format produces a competition the low handicappers cannot win.
The mechanism is simple: exact handicap × allowance, rounded half away from zero. At 95%, an exact 14 becomes 13.3, so the player plays off 13. At 85% the same player plays off 12.
Why team formats usually run lower
In individual Stableford, a high handicapper has to score on every hole. In a better-ball, they only have to score on the holes that suit them, and their bad holes are covered by a partner. The same handicap therefore buys more in a team format than in an individual one, which is why allowances below 100% are conventional there.
What to actually do about it
Decide it once per format, write it into your competition templates, and stop debating it in the bar. The thing that matters far more than the exact number is that it is the same number every time you run that format, because a competition that is scored differently from month to month is not a competition series.
Changing it after the fact
If you get it wrong, change the allowance and rescore. Nothing about the cards changes: the scores are what people shot, and the allowance is a rule applied on top of them. In ScribbleScore that is one setting and an automatic recalculation, but the principle holds whatever you use — never retype scores to fix a rule.
Countback, and settling it before the argument
The rule everyone knows exists and nobody can quote at prize giving.
When two results finish level, countback separates them by looking at progressively smaller portions of the back of the card. The conventional sequence is the last nine, then the last six, then the last three, then the last hole.
Over 18 holes that is holes 10 to 18, then 13 to 18, then 16 to 18, then 18. Over 9 holes it shifts down: the whole nine, then 4 to 9, then 7 to 9, then 9.
Why the back of the card
The reasoning is that finishing well under pressure is worth more than starting well, which is a defensible convention rather than a law of nature. What matters is that your club uses one convention consistently and can point at it when asked.
The case nobody plans for
Two players can be level on all four figures. It is rarer than it sounds but it does happen, and at that point countback has genuinely run out. The usual answer is a shared rank, with the next place skipped — two players tied for first, and the next player third.
Decide in advance what you do about the trophy in that case, because deciding it in front of the room is how clubs end up with a rule somebody disagrees with forever. Common answers: share it, count back further hole by hole, or hold a play-off if the prize warrants it.
Show your working
Whatever you decide, publish the countback figures alongside the result. A leaderboard that shows why one player is above another on the same points ends the conversation before it starts.
What a golf club owes its members under POPIA
Not legal advice, and worth ten minutes of a committee's time anyway.
A golf club holds names, contact details, handicaps and a detailed record of how every member played. Under the Protection of Personal Information Act the club is the responsible party for that information — not the software vendor, not the handicap system, the club.
The four questions worth being able to answer
- What do you hold, and why? If you cannot give a reason for a field, stop collecting it.
- Who can see it? Including which committee members, which staff, and which suppliers.
- How long do you keep it?Competition records legitimately last decades. A member's phone number probably should not outlive their membership by ten years.
- What happens when somebody asks you to delete it? You need an answer before you are asked, and someone whose job it is to act on it.
The one clubs get wrong most often
Publishing results in a way search engines index. A member expects their Saturday score to be visible to the club, not to be the first result when a prospective employer searches their name. If your results are on a public web page, check whether it is indexed — and if it is, decide deliberately whether that is what you meant.
Your suppliers are operators
Anyone processing member data on your instruction is an operator, and you are entitled to ask them where the data lives, who can reach it, what they do with it, and what happens when you leave. If a supplier cannot answer those four questions plainly, that is itself an answer.
Set out in full on our security and privacy page, including the parts we would rather not mention.
Everything above is on the page. There is no PDF to exchange your email address for, because the guide is the point rather than the bait.