Commissioner Guides

Golf Tournament Formats for Club Events and Charity Outings

6 min read · by theStick

Running a golf event for 40 to 144 players is a different sport from organizing a buddies game. The format decisions that barely matter in a foursome — how you start the field, how you flight it, how you keep pace — become the whole ballgame at scale. Whether you're a club pro's volunteer committee or a charity chair who drew the short straw, the same handful of decisions determines whether your event runs like a machine or ends with 20 groups stacked on the 16th tee at dusk.

Field size dictates the start format

Shotgun start (every group starts simultaneously on a different hole) is the default for 72–144 players. Everyone starts and finishes together, which is essential when there's a banquet, auction, or awards dinner attached. The math: 18 holes × 1 group per hole = 72 players minimum to justify it; a full "double shotgun" puts two groups on most holes (A and B groups) and handles up to 144, though pace suffers. Below about 60 players, a shotgun leaves half the course empty and the club may not close the tee sheet for you.

Tee times work for smaller fields (under ~60) or events without a hard-stop dinner. Groups off every 9–10 minutes means a 15-group field spans 2.5 hours from first to last tee ball — fine for a club championship, awkward for a gala.

Modified shotgun (groups start on holes 1–9 only, or 1 and 10) splits the difference for 40–70 players: a compressed field without the ghost-town back nine.

Book the format with the course before you print anything. A shotgun usually requires buying out the tee sheet, and that number shapes your entry fee.

Scramble: the charity default, and its variants

The scramble is the charity standard for good reasons: a 30-handicapper contributes, nobody posts an individual score, pace is fast, and teams of clients and donors can drink their way around without embarrassment. Everyone hits, the team picks the best ball, everyone hits from there.

The variants exist mostly to fix the scramble's one flaw — the best player hitting every meaningful shot:

Texas scramble typically adds a minimum-drives rule: each player's tee shot must be used at least 3 or 4 times. This is the single best rule you can add, because it makes the weakest player's driver matter on real holes.

Florida scramble (step-aside): the player whose shot is chosen sits out the next stroke. Spreads the load, slows things slightly, adds strategy about when to "spend" your best player.

Shamble: scramble off the tee, then everyone plays their own ball into the hole; score the best one or two balls. A good pick when your field skews toward real golfers who find pure scrambles dull.

For a mixed charity field: Texas scramble, minimum 3 drives per player, teams of four. Don't overthink it.

Flighting a mixed-skill field

One overall winner in a 100-player field means 96 people had no chance by the 5th hole. Flighting fixes that. Split the field into 2–4 divisions by team handicap (for scrambles, sum the four course handicaps) or individual index (for stroke-play events), and pay places within each flight. Practical guidance:

Aim for 12–20 teams or players per flight — big enough to be a real competition, small enough that mid-pack players can see the leaders.

Set flight boundaries after registration closes, at natural gaps in the handicap distribution, not at pre-announced round numbers. Pre-announced cutoffs invite handicap shopping.

For scrambles, many events skip formal flights and instead use a percentage-of-handicap team allowance (commonly 10% of the combined handicaps, subtracted from gross). It's cruder than flighting but far simpler to run.

Net vs. gross divisions

For club events with real golfers, run both and let each entry count in both: a gross division (raw scores — the low handicappers' competition) and a net division (handicap-adjusted). Two standard rules keep it clean: a player can win only one division, and gross gets precedence (if the club champ also has low net, he takes gross and net rolls down). Without those rules, one hot round sweeps both boards and the room goes flat at the awards. For stableford events, the same logic applies to points gross and net.

On-course games that raise money

For a charity event, the format is the appetizer — the games are the revenue:

Skins pool. Optional $20–25 per player buy-in, separate from entry. For scrambles run it on team scores; for individual events, net skins. Because a skin needs an outright low score on a hole, a 100-player pool often produces just 2–4 skins — which makes each one worth real money and gives you a great announcement moment at dinner.

Closest-to-pin on every par 3, with a proximity marker and clipboard. Sell "mulligan + CTP entry" packages at registration. Two per player, $10, cash at the table — it's the easiest $1,000 in the business.

Long drive (one hole, marked fairway), split men's/women's/senior if the field supports it.

Dots-style junk — a $5 buy-in pot for birdies, sandies, and chip-ins — works for smaller club days, though it needs honest self-reporting, so skip it above ~60 players.

Hole sponsorship + games holes: a "beat the pro" hole, a putting contest at the turn, a 50/50 raffle. None of it touches the format; all of it adds to the check you hand the charity.

Design for pace, or pay for it later

A shotgun scramble should finish in 4:30–4:45. If it doesn't, your dinner timeline dies. Build pace into the format itself: max score per hole (pick up at double bogey net in any own-ball format — with stableford scoring, picking up costs nothing anyway, which is exactly why stableford is the right scoring system for big net events), forward tees for higher handicaps and seniors, "good-good" putting encouraged in scrambles, and rangers with a mandate. Put your slowest known groups on holes that start them near the clubhouse (1, 10) so they can't back the field up from hole 4. And feed people on the course — a stopped beverage cart line is a five-minute delay times 18 groups.

Prize structures that don't get sandbagged

Sandbagging — riding an inflated handicap to the net title — is the cancer of net events. Structural defenses work better than accusations:

Cap the handicap you'll accept (a common ceiling: 18 for men, 24 for women, or 90% of index across the board).

Require a verifiable handicap (GHIN) for net divisions; unverified players compete gross-only or in a separate fun flight.

Pay breadth, not depth: five flights paying two places each beats one flight paying ten. More winners, smaller checks, less incentive to cheat for any single prize.

Keep prizes as merchandise or pro-shop credit for club events — people will do things for $500 cash they won't do for a $500 range-finder.

For scrambles, publish the team allowance formula in advance and require handicaps at registration, not on the morning of.

Scoring logistics for 18+ groups

The awards dinner starts 45 minutes after the last putt, and you owe the room verified results — that's the whole logistics problem. The paper version: one designated scorer per group, cards collected at 18 by a volunteer, two people at a laptop doing entry and a third auditing the math, CTP and long-drive markers collected by cart. It works, and it's always tighter than you want. Live mobile scoring — each group entering hole-by-hole on a phone with theStick or similar — flips the model: the leaderboard is done when the last group finishes, skins resolve themselves in real time, and the auction can start on schedule. Either way, three rules hold: every group has one named scorer, no result is announced until cards (or entries) are reconciled against a second source, and ties are broken by a scorecard playoff you announced in advance — back nine, then last six, then last three. The event people remember is the one where dinner started on time and the winners were right.

Run it on

Game rules mentioned in this guide

Scramble Florida Scramble Texas Scramble Stableford Skins Dots

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