How do you run a weekly golf league?
Set the season’s nights and hold the block of tee times, take a roster, decide up front how handicaps and drop weeks work, then score each night like a small tournament and let the standings recompute themselves from every score entered.
The short version
- Hold the tee times before you take a single sign-up.
- Decide average-per-night versus cumulative total before week one, not week eight.
- A handicap must be built from the weeks before the one it is applied to.
- Do not count partial rounds unless you have thought hard about drop weeks.
- Weeks 1–3
- The rounds the handicap is computed from.
- Week 4
- Played off that handicap. Tonight’s score never feeds tonight’s handicap, or a bad round would raise the handicap that cancels it out.
- Week 1
- Played scratch. There is nothing behind it to compute from yet.
A fourteen-week season, showing the weeks a single night's handicap is computed from. Only finished cards feed it — half a card measures nobody.
Before the season — hold the times
Pick the night, the weeks and the block of tee times, and reserve them before anybody signs up. A league that has to ask members to book their own tee time each week has invented a second job for itself and will lose a night to a public foursome by June.
Tee sheets generally only run a few weeks ahead, so the back half of a fourteen-week season has nothing to hold on setup day. Whatever system you use, make sure re-running the reservation later is a button and not a re-do.
The roster is the thing that makes a season a season
Every week’s scores have to attach to the same person as last week’s, or you do not have a league — you have fourteen unrelated evenings. A join code members enter once is enough; so is the pro shop typing the roster in. What matters is that it happens before scoring starts.
Decide the two settings before week one
How do weeks add up? An average per night, or a cumulative total? They agree until somebody misses a week, which is every league. On a cumulative total, a member who has played three of six Tuesdays reads as leading, and you will be explaining that in the parking lot. An average is usually right, and either way show how many weeks each member has played.
What about drop weeks? Discarding a member’s worst nights is nearly universal and nearly always right. Just never let a drop take somebody’s last remaining week, or a member who has played once has no season at all.
Handicaps, and the mistake everyone makes once
Net is gross minus handicap for the round. A running handicap has to be built from the weeks *before* the one it is applied to — if tonight’s bad round raises tonight’s handicap, it cancels itself out and nobody ever moves.
Week one is therefore played scratch. That is correct, not a gap: there is nothing to compute from yet.
Only count finished cards toward a handicap. Half a card measures nobody. And keep a way to type a handicap in by hand — the pro shop knows things the arithmetic does not.
Scoring the night
One scorer per group, on their phone, is how golf already works and it is the least friction you can get away with. Print a start sheet with a QR code per group and hand it to whoever is running the first tee.
Corrections will happen. Make sure fixing one hole in week three fixes the season standings immediately, rather than requiring somebody to go and rebuild a spreadsheet.
Put your tee times online without giving any away
Free setup, a free first month and no card to start. Tell us your hours and we will build your tee sheet before you decide anything.