How to organise a golf day, from the first idea to the prize-giving

Start with the date, the course and the format. Then choose the loop and the tee for each competition. It sounds like a detail, but the whole calculation rests on it: course rating and slope depend on the combination of loop, tee and men or women, and that is what each player's Course Handicap is worked out from. Nine holes are perfectly fine for a corporate afternoon; eighteen make sense for a club championship or a day where the golf is the main event.

Stableford or medal

In medal (stroke play) every shot counts, including the ones on the hole that took eight. In Stableford you score points hole by hole, and a disastrous hole is simply worth zero points, nothing worse. With a mixed field, with Handicap Indexes from 8 to 54, Stableford is the fairest and most enjoyable choice: everyone stays in the running until the end. And you do not even have to choose. Golfevent produces a gross medal leaderboard and a Stableford leaderboard from the same scorecard, so you can give the trophy to the best gross score and the prize of the day to whoever scored the most points.

This is the step to do first, and the one most often put off. Call the club well in advance and agree how many tee times you get, from what time, and whether you go off the 1st tee or play a shotgun start. In the same call, agree the green fees and book the room for the prize-giving and the catering straight away.

Then work backwards from the end of the day. An example with 48 players: that is twelve groups of four. With ten-minute intervals, the first group tees off at 9:00 and the last at 10:50. As a rough guide, allow about four and a half hours for 18 holes in groups of four, and about four hours in groups of three. The last scorecard is then in at around 15:20. Do not plan the prize-giving before 16:00, and give the club exactly that time.

Decide in advance which categories have something to win, because that determines how many prizes you need to buy. Golfevent produces two leaderboards for each competition: gross medal and Stableford. If men and women play separate competitions, that makes four main prizes. You can add a nearest the pin and a longest drive yourself; those are marked with flags on the course and noted down by hand, because the app does not handle them.

Also decide who hands out the prizes and at what time, and keep the prize-giving short. A small prize for everyone does more for the atmosphere than one big prize. For the winner of the gross medal you can add a line of your own, for example that they win the challenge trophy.

Golfevent starts in trial mode. There you set up and try out everything with up to four players: choosing the course, doing the draw, filling in scorecards. Online entry through your own page and publishing the results do not work in trial mode.

To go beyond four players, you activate the competition for €5.00, VAT included. It is a one-off payment that applies to that one competition only: not per player and not per month. Payment goes through Mollie (iDEAL, Bancontact, KBC/CBC, credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay), and the competition is active straight after payment. Do this before you send round the entry link, otherwise the first entries will find the door closed. See also the terms and conditions and the right of withdrawal.

A single link, in the WhatsApp group or the club newsletter, saves you most of the work. Your competition gets its own page, with a poster, an introduction, your colours and your logo. Below it is the entry form: name, men's or women's competition, Handicap Index, an email address or phone number, and a note.

Set the number of places per competition carefully: once it is reached, nobody else can enter. Entries reach you as requests; they only become players once you approve them. Put in the introduction what the day costs, what time the first tee time is, what is included in the entry fee and until when people can enter. It saves you an afternoon of messages.

Enter each player's Handicap Index, exactly as it stands on the day of the competition. Golfevent is not linked to any golf union's handicap database: the Handicap Index comes from the player, and either you enter it or the player gives it when entering. A plus handicap is no problem: the field goes from −10 to 54.

Decide in good time what to do with a player who has no Handicap Index. They can play without any problem, but without a handicap they receive no shots: their Stableford points are gross, not comparable with everyone else's, and they end up at the bottom of the Stableford leaderboard. The clean solution is to let them play outside the competition, or to agree with the whole group a Handicap Index they will play off.

Only do the draw once the list of players is complete, and only send the invitations after that. In that order, the group number and tee time are already in the invitation and you do not have to send anyone a correction. You can redo the draw as often as you like; the previous groups are then replaced.

Choose groups of two, three or four players, and the numbers work out: fifteen players with a maximum of four gives 4-4-4-3, not 4-4-4-2-1. The draw can be completely random, like names out of a hat, or balanced on handicap, so that the groups are of similar strength. Balancing is nice for a corporate day where people should get to know each other; a pure draw suits a club championship where nobody should look favoured. Then choose a start from the 1st tee with an interval in minutes, or a shotgun start. Group by group, the tee time or starting hole can still be changed.

Each player receives their own player code, by email or WhatsApp. With that code they open their scorecard on the day; there is no app to install. Every player has their own language: you set it per player, or they choose it themselves, and the invitation and scorecard follow that choice. English, Dutch, French, German and Italian are available.

Take two minutes at the first tee to explain it: everyone enters their own holes on their phone, it works even without signal, and after the round they hand in their card and have it verified by a playing partner. Anyone who prefers can also keep the score for one or more playing partners on their own phone, with the group scorecard, and then verify their cards. Keep the list of codes to hand for anyone who can no longer find their invitation.

Someone drops out just before the start? You can still redo the draw on the day itself: remove the player and draw again, or let that group go out one player short.

• A score on a hole runs from 1 to 10. A player who picks up records the hole as not completed; it is worth zero Stableford points.
• Until the card is handed in, the player corrects their own mistakes. After that, only you can reopen the card, and the marker's verification lapses.
• The marker must be a playing partner in the same competition and, if the draw has been made, in the same group. Players cannot verify their own card.
• Before the prize-giving, run down the list: which cards have not yet been handed in, and which have not yet been verified.

This is exactly where golf days used to grind to a halt. Now it is a single screen where you see, player by player, how many holes have been entered and whether the card is in and verified.

Until you publish, nobody sees the leaderboard, not even their own position. That keeps the suspense going until the last putt and avoids arguments about who was leading. First check that all cards have been handed in and verified, then press publish: the results are on everyone's phone before the first prize is handed out. You can also take the results offline again, for instance if a card still needs correcting.

Incomplete cards always go to the bottom, in Stableford too: thirty points after twelve holes tells you nothing. On a tie, the player with the lower Playing Handicap wins, because they received fewer shots. Useful to know when someone asks at the prize-giving.

Share the link to the results in the group once more and thank the players, the sponsors and the club. Then archive the competition: the results stay, and the players' email addresses and phone numbers are deleted. That is also the clear answer to the question of what happens to that data.

Finally, note down three things for next year: whether the tee-time interval was right, how long the round actually took and what went wrong. With that note, preparing the next edition will take you half an hour.