Guides

How to run a member-guest golf tournament

A member-guest is the marquee event on many club calendars: members invite a guest, play as a two-person team, and everyone wants it to feel special. Here's how to run one smoothly.

Set the field and the format early. Two-person teams playing best ball or a modified Stableford keep pace-of-play reasonable and let guests of any level contribute. Decide gross, net, or flighted before invitations go out so handicaps can be collected up front.

Build your pairings and a shotgun start so every team finishes together — it makes the scoreboard reveal and the awards far more fun. ScrambleBoard derives cart numbers and starting holes from your roster order, so you can print cart signs and a pairings sheet in one click.

Kill the scoring bottleneck. Instead of collecting paper cards at the turn, each team scores on one phone as they play, the leaderboard updates live on every device and the clubhouse TV, and you finalize with a single tap when the last group is in.

Make it feel premium: put the live board on the clubhouse TV, add sponsor logos to the rotation, and hand out printed scorecards. It's the difference between a casual round and an event guests ask to come back for. See how it works or read the formats guide first.