Before the first group tees off, the Committee should have settled and published the Terms of the Competition: the form of play, which tees are in use, the handicap allowance, the stroke index allocation, how the field is set if too many enter, and how a tie will be decided. The R&A's Committee Procedures, Section 5A, is guidance rather than a Rule, so most of what it asks of a Committee is a "should". One line in it binds, and it binds the player: "It is the responsibility of each player to know and follow the Terms of the Competition." Nobody can know Terms that were never written down, which is why they have to exist in full before play rather than being assembled on the Sunday afternoon from what the Committee remembers having meant.
How many competitions does a club actually run?
More than the word "event" suggests, and the best published count comes from the UK. Hillier Hopkins' Members' and Proprietary Golf Clubs' Survey 2024/25 Report, the 19th annual edition, published with the Golf Club Secretary Newsletter and the UK Golf Federation, reports 2024 data from 69 UK members' clubs across nine regions, 86% of them 18-hole, alongside 11 proprietary clubs. Member competitions run during the year ranged from 6 to 324, with an average of 123, similar to the 121 recorded for 2023. Hillier Hopkins is an accountancy firm that serves golf clubs, which is worth knowing when reading its survey.
One hundred and twenty-three a year is ten a month, most of them on a Saturday, nearly all of them run by the same handful of volunteers. At that volume the Terms, the draw, the allowance and the countback are not occasional decisions. They are a weekly system, and it behaves like every other weekly system at the club: the parts that are written down hold, and the parts that live in one person's head fail on the Saturday that person is away.
What should the Committee publish before play?
The R&A's Committee Procedures, Section 5A, defines the document: "Terms of the Competition determine the structure of each competition including who may enter, how to enter, what the schedule and format of the competition will be and how ties will be decided." It then sets out the Committee's duties, verbatim: "Set clear and concise terms for each competition. Make these terms available to players in advance of the competition. Interpret the terms should any questions arise." And once play has begun: "Other than in exceptional circumstances, the Committee should avoid altering the Terms of the Competition once the competition has started."
Read against Section 5A(1) to 5A(3) and 5A(6), the Terms a club competition needs come down to the list below. It is numbered so it can be lifted whole and pinned up; each line is a decision to make in writing before the first entry is taken.
- Form of play. Match play, stroke play, or stroke play qualifying for match play, with the scoring format named: medal, Stableford, par or bogey, maximum score.
- Holes and rounds. The number and order of holes in a round, the number of rounds and whether there is a cut. If there is a cut: when it falls, whether ties for the last qualifying place are broken and how, and how many players continue.
- Tees. Which teeing areas are in use, and whether the tee a player uses depends on handicap, gender or age.
- Stroke index allocation. Section 5A(3) names it in terms: "Stroke index allocation, such as the order of holes at which handicap strokes are to be given or received." It decides every Stableford point and every net hole score, so the Terms should state which index is in force.
- Handicap allowance. The percentage of Course Handicap each player receives for the format. The allowances by format, and the finding that the national associations in Great Britain and Ireland have made them mandatory, are in the handicap allowances by format article; the checklist needs only the line naming the allowance in force.
- Partner handicap limits. In foursomes or four-ball, Section 5A(1)d allows the Committee to limit "the maximum difference between partners' handicaps" or "the maximum total handicaps of partners", and to reduce a handicap to meet the limit. If the club applies one, the Terms say so and say what happens to a pair that exceeds it.
- Handicaps across rounds. For a competition over more than one round, whether each player uses the handicap held at the first round throughout or a revised handicap each round. The R&A's recommendation, verbatim: "It is recommended that the player's handicaps remain unchanged between such rounds."
- Flights or draws. Whether the field is divided into flights or divisions, on what basis, and how the draw is made and published.
- Entry, and what happens when too many enter. Who may enter, how and by when. Section 5A(2) asks the Terms to specify "The procedure to be used in determining the field when the competition is oversubscribed, such as accepting entries in the order received, through a qualifier or based on lowest handicaps." Pick one and publish it, and the first oversubscribed medal of the season stops being an argument.
- How ties are decided. For the winner and for every other position that carries a prize: the method, the ladder and what happens if the ladder produces no winner. The next section gives the R&A's own wording.
- Prizes. What will be awarded, for which positions and divisions, and whether a player may win more than one.
One word about the verb. Committee Procedures "provides guidance to Committees", in its own words, so each line is a "should", and a club is free to decide differently for good reason. The duty that does not bend is the player's, and it is only fair if the Terms were there to be read. Every item on the list is a question somebody will ask in the bar at half past five, and a Committee that has answered it in writing gets to go home.
How should a tie be decided?
By whatever method the Terms said before play began, and for a club competition that does not want a play-off the R&A's recommended default is matching scorecards. Section 5A(6)d of The R&A's Committee Procedures: "If a play-off is not feasible or desired, the Terms of the Competition may specify that any ties will be decided by matching scorecards. Even when the winner of a competition is to be decided by a play-off, other positions in the competition may be decided by matching scorecards. The method of matching scorecards should also provide for what will happen if this procedure does not produce a winner."
The ladder, from the same section: "determine the winner based on the score for the last nine holes, last six holes, last three holes and finally the 18th hole. If there is still a tie, then the last six holes, three holes and final hole of the first nine holes will be considered in turn." Over more than one round, the best score for the last round is compared first. And if all of that fails: "the Committee could consider the competition a tie, or alternatively could decide the winner by a random method (such as tossing a coin)." That last provision is the part most club Terms omit: a coin, a shared prize or a tie on the board is fine, provided it was written down first.
Two recommendations from the same section settle arguments before they can start. On match play: "A tie in a match should not be decided by a stroke-play play-off." On stroke play: "A tie in stroke play should not be decided by a match." And where a handicap play-off is held over fewer than 18 holes, Section 5A(6)c scales the strokes to the holes played: "if a play-off is over one hole, one-eighteenth of the handicaps should be deducted from the scores for the play-off hole."
On a two-tee or shotgun start, count back by hole number
Section 5A(6)d adds a consideration for any club starting from more than one tee: "If this method is used in a competition with a multiple tee start, it is recommended that the 'last nine holes, last six holes, etc.' are holes 10-18, 13-18, etc." By the number on the card, in other words, and not by the nine each player happened to finish on. A player who started at the 7th has a different personal back nine from the player who started at the 1st, and the recommendation removes that difference before it becomes a dispute.
Wording a Committee can copy
The R&A publishes sample Terms wordings alongside Section 5A. Its team-competition countback clause, verbatim:
"In the event of a tie, the result shall be decided over the team scores for the last 18 holes. If the tie is still unresolved, the result shall be decided over the last nine holes, failing which the last six holes, failing which the last three holes. If the tie's then still unresolved, the result shall be decided over the last six holes of the first nine holes of the last round, failing which the last three holes of the first nine holes. If the tie then be still unresolved the result shall be decided by counting back hole-by-hole, starting with the last hole of the last 18 holes."
For a single-round individual competition the first rung falls away and the ladder begins at the last nine. Adapt it, add the multiple-tee sentence if the day is a shotgun, and the tie is settled before anyone has hit a ball.
Two-tee or shotgun: how should a big field start?
On an interval day the decision is the interval; on a shotgun the decision is whether every group can be in position at once. The R&A Pace of Play Manual, 2021, treats both.
Start with the interval. The manual, in its own words: "When play is in two-balls an interval of at least 8 minutes is recommended. When play is in three-balls this should be increased to at least 10 minutes. When play is in four-balls, 11 or even 12 minute intervals should be considered." It then gives the rule that decides the number: "the starting interval should not be shorter than the time it should take to play the quickest hole on the course". Its warning is blunt: overcrowding is "the most common cause of longer than necessary rounds and unacceptable waiting times", and where the intervals are too narrow, "adopting all or any of the other recommendations in this manual will be futile".
Two-tee starts are the shape most big club days take, and the manual's caution on them is specific. Section 2.2c: "If two-tee starts are adopted, it is important not to have too many groups going out from the 1st and 10th tees." Players making the turn otherwise wait for those tees to clear, and the saving is gone. Starter's gaps belong to the same arithmetic: with 10 minute intervals and an empty starting time after every tenth group, Section 2.2b notes, "there will be a 10 minute break in play from the 1st tee every 90 minutes", which is where a lost ball or a hard hole gets absorbed.
A shotgun is a different problem: none of that interval arithmetic applies, because a shotgun has no starting interval. Section 2.2d of the manual: a shotgun start "is an effective way of getting more players around the course in a shorter period of time, simply because more of the holes are utilised from the start rather than needing to be filled from the 1st tee (or the 1st and 10th tees)". Then the two sentences a Committee needs: "Efficient organisation is vital when conducting a shotgun start as you need to ensure that all players are in position at the appropriate starting time", and "As the course will be full from the beginning, managing a good pace of play is crucial." Like a two-tee start, it adds, a shotgun should still allow two waves of play, morning and afternoon.
So for a shotgun the Committee's job on the day is positional: a start sheet that names every group's starting hole, a way of getting them there, a signal and a pace plan that assumes the course is full from the first minute. Managing pace itself, on any sort of day, has its own pace-of-play playbook for clubs. What the competition checklist needs from the day is the start sheet, with a starting hole against every group.
What does the software have to hold?
Every line of the checklist is either a field or a rule, and the Sunday disappears when the system holds what the Terms said rather than somebody re-deriving it from a pile of cards. Mapped back line by line, this is what the competition module has to carry, and what ours does.
Form of play first. A competition is created with a scoring format, one of ten: stroke play, Stableford, match play, scramble, shamble, best ball, alternate shot, Chapman, skins, or no scoring at all for a social day. It carries a category as well, one of twelve.
Then the allowance and the index. The WHS Appendix C allowance is applied automatically for the format, individual and team alike, and the Committee can set a per-competition percentage override in the competition setup when the Terms say something different. Handicap strokes fall on the course's stroke index, hardest hole first, wrapping past 18 for a handicap above 18, and a plus handicap gives strokes back starting from the easiest hole. The index is snapshotted onto each card when it is played, so re-indexing the course next winter never moves the strokes on a card from last summer, and Stableford, per-hole net, net skins and countback all read from that one allocation.
Ties next. Left alone, a tie stands as a tie, which is one of the outcomes Section 5A(6)d allows. Where the Committee has opted into a card countback for the competition, the method the system computes is the matching-scorecards method of the same section: last nine, last six, last three, last hole, computed on hole numbers (holes 10 to 18, 13 to 18, 16 to 18 and the 18th) so a shotgun or two-tee start is counted back the way the R&A recommends. One setting drives the leaderboard, the final positions and the prizes, so they cannot disagree about how a tie broke. Where the ladder does not separate two cards, the tie stands.
Starts are formats in their own right: shotgun, crossover and back-nine. Each tee-sheet slot carries its starting hole as part of its identity, and the starting holes are carried onto the pairings and so onto the start sheet.
Entry and the draw are where most of the Sunday used to go. Online entry with an entry fee and a guest fee, a field capacity, a per-member entry limit, registration open and close times, early access for a defined group, and an ordered waitlist that makes offers and lets them expire. Confirmation goes out by email and SMS. The fee is recorded against the entry and marked paid by staff. Flights by handicap band; divisions by gender, handicap band, membership type or a named roster; multi-round series. Pairings are drawn by handicap-balanced snake draft, at random, from player requests, by flight, with teams locked together, or by hand.
And the scoring itself. Scoring is through the authenticated member portal, and the Rule 3.3b attestation is enforced in software: a marker signs the card, a player cannot attest their own, a card can be disputed and an administrator can revoke an attestation. Round close locks every card, fixes the final positions and resolves the prizes, including prizes paid as credit to a member's account. The season standings, the Order of Merit, refresh on round close, and the awards the club records against the season appear on the Honours Board of its website.
Three things stated plainly, because a Committee should know where the system stops. The Terms themselves are still the Committee's document: a competition carries a description and the settings above, not a Terms template. The only tie method the system computes is matching scorecards; a play-off, where the Terms call for one, is the Committee's to run on the course. And index submission to a national federation is not live: the system maintains its own WHS-style index, and two-way submission to the national body is on the roadmap rather than in the product.
What this says nothing about
There is no published figure for the hours a UK or Irish club spends administering a competition, between the first entry and the published result, and none appears here. The R&A's material is procedural and carries no timings. Hillier Hopkins counts competitions and does not time them. The one survey instrument that might hold such a number, the NGCOA's Golf Business Pulse report, is American and available to members only, so even if the figure is inside it, it describes a different market. Any vendor quoting an hours-saved figure for competition administration is quoting something they measured themselves, or something nobody measured.
The substitute is more useful than the average would have been. Time your own next three competitions, starting when entries open and stopping when the result is published with the countback visible on it. Three is enough to see the pattern, and to see where the hours went. Whatever that total comes to, it is the only version of the number that describes your club.
Run the test on your last competition
Take the last competition your club ran and ask four questions of it. Were the Terms published before entries opened, somewhere a player could read them? Did they name the handicap allowance and the stroke index in force? Did they say how a tie would be decided, including what happens if the ladder runs out? And did the published result match what the Terms said, with the countback shown on the card rather than asserted?
If the answer to all four is yes, and the result was out within the hour with the countback on it, the club's current system is doing what the Rules ask of it and there is nothing on this page to buy. If any answer is no, the fix is on the checklist above, and it costs nothing but the Committee's time.
Then hold us to the same four questions. A competition module's job, on any Saturday, is to hold what the Terms said and to produce the result that follows from them. Take its result for a shotgun day and check the tie down the card columns, holes 10 to 18 first, by hole number rather than by who finished where. If the result cannot be checked that way, against the cards, the module has not earned the Sunday it is promising to give back.