Setting Up a Tournament

Everything in this guide happens on the Tournaments page of the admin interface, with two optional on-course surfaces joining in on event day: the scorekeeper tablet (/scorekeeper) and the cart screens. This walks a tournament from creation to payouts in the order you’ll actually do it.

1. Create the tournament

Click New Tournament and work down the form:

1. Name, a Short Code (the code scorers pick the event by) and the Date.

2. Format — one of:

   Format	Scored as
   Stroke Play	Individual gross/net strokes
   Scramble	One team ball per hole
   Best Ball	Best individual score per hole counts for the team
   Shamble	Team drive, individual play-in
   Stableford / Modified Stableford	Points per hole against par
   Skins	Holes won outright, paid from the pot

3. Scoring Mode — Scorekeeper Only, Cart Entry or Both (see step 5).

4. Holes — 9 or 18. The tournament is created with one round; setting up multi-round events isn’t on the screen yet.

5. Team Event — check it for scramble/best-ball style formats. The team size defaults to 4; change it (2–6) on the tournament’s Setup tab.

6. Use Handicaps — check it and set the Handicap %: 100% for a full-handicap event, lower for partial-handicap formats.

7. Optionally set an Entry Fee and a Purse, then click Create.

2. Understand the status workflow

A tournament moves through Draft → Open → Active → Completed, and can be Cancelled at any point (a cancelled event can go back to Draft). Advance it with the status buttons at the top of the tournament page — Open, Start (to Active), Finish (to Completed) and Cancelled.

The one that bites people: scores can only be entered while the tournament is Active. If a scorer reports an error saying scores can’t be entered, check the status before anything else.

3. Register players

Open the tournament, go to Participants and click Add Participant. Search the membership and click a member to add them, or type a guest’s name (and handicap index) under Add Guest and choose the Sponsor — the member billed the guest’s entry fee (left blank, it is the member on the guest’s team; ClubCore refuses and says why if that is ambiguous). Players are added one at a time. Then build the playing groups on the Groups tab with Auto-Generate (Random) or By Handicap.

Handicaps are snapshotted at registration. A player’s handicap index is stored when they’re added, and when the course’s slope, rating and par are set ClubCore computes their playing handicap, adjusted by the tournament’s handicap percentage. Because the snapshot is taken at registration, a later change to a member’s index doesn’t silently reshuffle an event that’s already set.

Entry fees bill automatically. If the tournament has an entry fee, adding a member to the roster immediately posts that fee as a charge to their member account, and a guest’s fee is charged to their sponsoring member — and marking a player withdrawn, or removing them from the roster, automatically reverses it. Confirm the fee is right before you register the field.

For team events, enter a team name on each participant to group them into teams.

4. Flights

Splitting a field into flights (Championship, A Flight, B Flight…) isn’t available on the tournament screens yet — there’s no flight control and no flight column on the roster. For now, run flighted events by team name or handle the flights outside ClubCore.

5. Choose a scoring mode

Each tournament has a scoring mode that controls who is allowed to submit scores:

Mode	Who scores
Scorekeeper only	Staff and the scorekeeper tablet; cart screens show the event but can’t submit
Cart entry	Golfers enter their group’s card on the cart screen
Both	Either surface may submit

The mode is enforced on the server: in scorekeeper-only events a cart that tries to submit gets a clear “cart scoring is disabled” error rather than silently contending with the official scorer for the same card. Staff entry is never blocked by the mode — if a cart breaks down mid-round, the admin interface can always finish the card.

Use scorekeeper only for events with an official scorer (club championships, anything with a purse), cart entry for casual member events where groups keep their own card, and both when volunteers cover some groups and carts cover the rest.

6. Enter scores on event day

Once the tournament is Active, scores flow in three ways:

• Admin interface — open the tournament’s Scoring tab, select a group, and enter hole-by-hole scores for each player in it (build the groups first).
• Scorekeeper tablet — volunteers browse to /scorekeeper on any phone or tablet, sign in with a 4-digit PIN, and select the active tournament. Their entries sync to the admin interface in real time.
• Cart screens — in cart-entry and both modes, groups enter their card on the cart’s screen as they play, over the same club-owned LoRa radio link the cart uses for ordering — no course wifi required.

7. Run the live leaderboard

The leaderboard recalculates automatically as scores land — rankings follow the tournament format (strokes, points, or team scores), and with Use Handicaps on, results rank by net — with a full view and a compact view. Open the Leaderboard tab on the tournament page and project it on a clubhouse screen; the board updates itself live as scores land — carried in from cart screens over the club-owned LoRa radio mesh and from scorekeeper entries — with no refreshing needed. Members can also follow the standings from the member portal.

For a Skins event, the Leaderboard tab shows Skins Results as play progresses — which holes have been won outright, and what each skin is worth from the pot.

8. Close out

When the last card is in:

1. Review the final leaderboard and, for skins events, the per-hole payout breakdown — each skin’s value is calculated from the pot automatically.
2. Advance the status to Completed.

Entry-fee charges are already on each player’s member account from registration, on the same books as the rest of the club, and tournament results feed the reporting module alongside revenue and activity reports.

Where to go next

• On-course cart & kitchen display — the LoRa link the cart scoring and live leaderboard ride on.
• Point of Sale & F&B — how tournament-day food and beverage runs on the same books as entry fees.

Want to run one yourself? Request a demo, see plans, or get in touch.