Why Your Golf League Should Ditch the Spreadsheet

A golf league spreadsheet works until you count the hours it takes. For the Mulligan Tour, a 40-plus player league, the spreadsheets ate about 3 hours every week. Software cut that to about 5 minutes.

What a league spreadsheet does every week

A league spreadsheet is rarely one spreadsheet. It is a set of them, and each one has a job: handicaps, stats, tournament results, money, and the numbers that go on the league website. Scores come in from the scorecards, lookup formulas and pivot tables pull them into the other sheets, and someone copies results into the places that need them.

Admins who are good with spreadsheets build this well. Ours was efficient, as spreadsheets go. It still cost 3 hours a week.

Where the time goes

The Mulligan Tour plays with 35 to 50 scorecards a week. Running it on spreadsheets meant:

• Typing the numbers from every scorecard into a sheet.
• Checking that the pivot tables carried those numbers over correctly.
• Copying and pasting the results into three more places for the money stats and the other stats we tracked.
• Updating the website by hand.

That is about 3 hours when everything goes right. When a number looked wrong, tracking it down took up to another hour. Did someone transpose two digits when typing scores, or did a formula get inverted somewhere? You find out by checking cell by cell, and it is stressful because players are waiting on the results.

About 15 years ago we moved scoring to a live scoring app. It cut the work to roughly an hour and a half a week. The app exported the scores, but handicaps and the rest of our stats were still tracked by hand.

What a small league thinks it is saving

A new admin with a 20-player league thinks: software costs money, and the spreadsheet will only take half an hour to an hour a week. Why pay?

That math leaves out three things:

1. Setup time. Someone has to build the lookup formulas and pivot tables before the first round.
2. Checking. Entering scores is the easy part. Double-checking everything, and then finding the error when a standing does not make sense, is the hard part.
3. The player experience. A spreadsheet does not give players live scoring. They cannot pull up a buddy’s scorecard to see how he played that day. Someone also has to get the weekly results and stats to everybody, by email or on a website, and the question is how long that takes and whether players can read it on their phones.

The cost of automating most of a league can come in under $3 to $5 per player, even in a 20-player league. Next to an admin’s hours every week, the spreadsheet is not the cheap option.

A Mulligan Tour week with software

The Mulligan Tour runs on LeaderBoard Caddie. Everything we used spreadsheets for, LeaderBoard Caddie now does.

Season setup. Our schedule is nearly the same every year. Dates and courses change, and the rest stays put. At the start of the year we run a wizard that takes about 2 minutes. It copies the previous year’s schedule and creates the events. We confirm the dates, courses and a few minor details, and the schedule goes onto our website for the year.

Each week. Players confirm whether they are playing in that week’s tournament. We either build the groups ourselves or have LeaderBoard Caddie make them randomly. If someone drops out or gets added, a few taps on a phone fix the groups in under a minute, and the new tee sheet shows up in the app and on the website in less than a minute.

On the course. One player in each group enters scores for the whole group. After the round, the group confirms the scores and presses a button.

After the round. Handicaps update, stats refresh, and everything goes to the website in seconds.

Start to finish, a week that used to take 3 to 5 hours of admin work now takes less than 5 minutes.

The mistake first-time admins make

The admin who is strong with spreadsheets is the most likely to build one for the league. Lookup formulas and pivot tables feel efficient, and for the person building them, they are. The players get nothing out of them.

Three mistakes to avoid:

• Counting only the entry time. The real cost is entry plus checking plus hunting for errors.
• Leaving the player experience out. Players cannot follow the round live or look up each other’s scores.
• Treating results as a separate chore. Every email or website update after the round is more work that software does as part of posting scores.

When a spreadsheet is still fine

If the league is small and nobody cares about live scoring or a player-facing website, a spreadsheet can do the job. A league that “only takes a half hour to an hour a week” still adds up over a season of weekly rounds, and that is before you chase a single error. The Mulligan Tour is at 35 to 50 scorecards a week, and at that size the spreadsheet stopped being worth it for us long ago.

What to look for in league software

Match the software to the jobs your spreadsheets do now:

• Scoring. Can players enter scores on their phones, and can the group confirm them after the round?
• Handicaps. Does the software update them automatically? Handicap methods are covered in Golf League Handicaps, and some leagues cannot post to GHIN at all, as explained in Running a League That Cannot Post to GHIN.
• Money and side games. Can it calculate payouts and stats? Try the free skins calculator to see what automatic payout math looks like.
• Schedule and groups. Can you copy last year’s schedule, and can you fix groups from a phone when a player drops out?
• Website. Do results publish themselves?
• Player view. Can players see live scores and other players’ scorecards?

FAQ

How many players before a league spreadsheet stops being worth it? The Mulligan Tour spent about 3 hours a week at 35 to 50 scorecards. Even a 20-player league’s half hour to an hour a week is real time over a season, and it comes with setup and error-checking on top.

What is the most common error in a golf league spreadsheet? Transposed numbers when typing scores, and inverted or broken formulas. Both are slow to find because you have to check the entries and the formulas.

Can I use a live scoring app and keep my spreadsheet? Yes. We did, starting about 15 years ago. It cut our weekly work from about 3 hours to about an hour and a half, but we still tracked handicaps and other stats by hand.

Can software handle groups and drop-outs? On the Mulligan Tour, we either build groups ourselves or let LeaderBoard Caddie randomize them. Adding or removing a player is a few taps on a phone and takes under a minute, and the updated tee sheet appears in the app and on the website in less than a minute.

Do I have to rebuild my schedule every year? Not with LeaderBoard Caddie. A 2-minute wizard copies the previous year’s schedule and creates the events, and you confirm the dates, courses and details.

How do players see results? On the Mulligan Tour, results and stats are pushed to our website within seconds of the group confirming scores.