More than just your first round — this is the full picture. From organization structure to weekly automation, handicap rules to messaging, here's how to set up Your Golf Group the right way.

The Quick Start guide gets you to a first round in under an hour. This guide gets you to a well-run operation that runs itself for an entire season. There's a difference between turning the key and knowing how the engine works. This is the engine guide.

We'll go top-to-bottom through the whole setup: your organization structure, group configuration, courses, players, automated scheduling, signup controls, messaging, handicaps, and what happens at the end of a season. Some sections are five minutes of reading; a few deserve more time. We'll flag which is which.

1. Understanding the Structure: Org → Groups → Players

Everything in Your Golf Group lives inside a three-level hierarchy, and understanding it will save you confusion for every decision you make after this.

At the top is your Organization — your club, company, friend group, or whatever crew this is. One organization holds your billing, your subdomain, and your player roster. Think of it as the umbrella.

Under the organization are your Groups. A group represents a specific league or format: Saturday Men's Stableford, Sunday Ladies' Nine-Hole, Weekday Seniors, Annual Corporate Scramble. Each group has its own scoring settings, team size preference, eligibility rules, and round schedule. One organization can have as many groups as you need.

At the bottom are your Players. Players belong to the organization and are assigned to one or more groups. Here's the key thing: the same player can be in multiple groups, and they only need one profile. Dave plays in the Saturday league and the corporate scramble — one Dave, two groups, one invite email, one profile to maintain.

Your subscription covers the entire organization. You're not paying per group or per player — just one admin plan for the whole operation.

2. Setting Up Your Organization

Your organization profile is the foundation. Most of these settings are one-time — set them once and forget about them.

Organization name — This appears on your player dashboards, emails, and printed scorecards. Use your actual club or group name, not something internal.
Logo — Upload your club or group logo. It appears in the dashboard header and on communications. A clean PNG with a transparent background works best.
Subdomain — Your organization gets a custom URL: yourgroup.yourgolfgroup.com. Set this once and share it with your players — it's how they bookmark the app.
Billing and plan — Choose the plan that matches your player count and features needed. You can upgrade mid-season with no disruption.
Contact information — Used for admin notifications and support escalation. Keep this current.

3. Creating and Configuring Your Groups

Groups are where the real configuration lives. Each group is its own world — independent scoring rules, team sizes, and eligibility settings. Take your time here. A well-configured group requires almost no intervention once it's running.

Group Name

Be descriptive. “Saturday Stableford” is a good group name. “Group 1” will confuse your players and confuse you six months from now. If you have multiple groups, include the day, format, or gender in the name: “Tuesday Ladies 9-Hole,” “Annual Club Championship,” “Weekday Seniors Strokeplay.” These names show up in emails, the round schedule, and the leaderboard — make them meaningful.

Scoring Type

This is the most consequential setting in the whole system. Choose carefully.

Points-Based Stableford awards points on each hole based on your score relative to par, adjusted for the handicap strokes you receive on that hole. The standard points scale: birdie or better = 4 pts, par = 2 pts, bogey = 1 pt, double bogey or worse = 0 pts. If you receive a handicap stroke on a hole, your effective par is one shot better — meaning a bogey on a stroke hole is worth 2 points, not 1.

The beauty of Stableford for weekly groups: a blown hole costs you nothing. Pick up, move on, make a par on the next hole. For a mixed-handicap group where 12-handicappers play alongside 28-handicappers, this is the right format — everyone stays in the game all 18 holes.

Score-Based stroke play is net or gross total strokes — lowest wins. Cleaner mathematically, more brutal competitively. Best for groups with narrow handicap ranges, tournament events, or serious low-handicap players who want a pure number at the end.

Preferred Team Size

Set foursomes (4 players per team) or fivesomes (5 players per team). Think practically: how many players typically sign up for your rounds? Twenty players fit into 4 fivesomes or 5 foursomes — same course capacity, different feel. Foursomes tend to pace faster because fewer players are tracking shots. Fivesomes are efficient for large groups that want to minimize tee time slots. Set the default here; you can always override it for individual rounds.

Gender Eligibility

Set to Everyone, Male Only, or Female Only. This controls who can be added to or sign up for rounds in this group. For most general groups, “Everyone” is correct. Single-gender leagues should set this appropriately — it prevents an accidental add of a player who isn't eligible for the format.

Active and Private Toggles

An inactive group is hidden from the schedule and can't have new rounds added. Use this for off-season groups — it keeps things tidy without deleting history. A private group won't appear in any public listings (for when your group operates on a need-to-know basis, or just really hates unsolicited participation).

Signup Message

This message appears at the top of the signup screen every time a player signs up for a round in this group. Update it each week if needed. Common uses: “Bring $10 cash for the skins pot,” “Tee time is 7:30 sharp — don't be the Dave who holds up the whole field,” “Spikeless only — course is recovering from last week's rain.” It gets read. Use it.

Aerial view of golf course — One organization. Multiple groups. One clean dashboard.

4. Adding Your Course Library

Courses in Your Golf Group are more than a name — they hold the full hole-by-hole data that makes handicap calculations accurate and scorecards correct. Here's how to build them out.

Navigate to the Courses section and search for your home course. If it's already in the system (added by another organization at the same club), you're done — link it to your group and move on. If it's not there, you'll add it.

When adding a course, you'll define it in two nine-hole segments (Nine 1 and Nine 2). For each nine, add the nine holes with:

Par — 3, 4, or 5 for each hole
Stroke index — 1 through 18 (1 through 9 for nine-hole courses), where 1 is the hardest hole and 18 is the easiest. This is printed on every official scorecard from your pro shop.
Tee yardages — optional, but useful for printed scorecards

Stroke index is what determines who gets extra strokes on which holes when handicaps are applied. A 10-handicap player gets one stroke on each of the ten hardest holes (stroke index 1 through 10). The system uses these numbers automatically when calculating Stableford points — so accurate stroke indexes = accurate results.

✓ Check First

Before adding a course, always search for it by name. If your course is already in the system (added by another organization or by our team), you don't need to re-enter it. Duplicate courses make a mess. Search, then add only if it's missing.

5. Adding Players the Right Way

The Players page is where your roster lives. Here's what each field does and why it matters.

①

First & Last Name

Obvious — but get the spelling right. These names appear on scorecards, leaderboards, emails, and printed team sheets. “Jon” vs. “John” is a surprisingly common argument at the first tee. Avoid it.

②

Email Address

Required for sending the invite; optional if you're manually managing everything. Strongly recommended in both cases. With an email, the player creates their own free account, gets automated round notifications, and can self-signup for future rounds. Without one, you're doing all of that manually, every week, for every round. Their time is yours; your time is not.

③

Member Number

Optional. For clubs that use membership numbers in their records, entering the member number here lets you cross-reference your existing club database. It appears on reports and exports. Leave blank if you don't use them.

④

Current Handicap

This is the player's playing handicap — the number they actually use on the course today. Enter it as a decimal if appropriate (e.g., 14.2, not just 14). This becomes their starting handicap in the system, and it will automatically adjust as rounds are posted. If you're loading historical data, the system will recalculate this based on round history — but for new setups, enter their best current number.

⑤

Initial 18-Hole Average Points

For Stableford groups only. This is the player's expected Stableford points per 18 holes before enough rounds are logged in the system. Think of it as their scoring baseline: a mid-handicapper might average around 32–36 points; a strong single-figure player might average 38–42. If you have historical data, use the actual average. If you're estimating, a reasonable starting point is 34 for most club-level players. This number adjusts automatically once they've played several rounds in the system — it's just a starting anchor, not a permanent label.

⑥

Group Assignment

Assign the player to every group they play in. This is what makes them visible in the signup list for that group's rounds. A player can be in as many groups as needed — one profile, many groups.

⑦

Send Invite Email

Toggle this on to immediately send the player an invite to create their free account. The email includes their login link and a brief welcome message (which you can customize — more on that in the Messaging section). If you're doing a bulk player load and want to send invites all at once afterward, you can leave this off and send them from the Players list page later.

Golfers walking the fairway — Your players are already here. Now the system knows it too.

6. The Default Week: Your Season on Autopilot

This is one of the most powerful features in the system — and the one that separates admins who spend thirty minutes a week on admin work from those who spend two hours. Set up Default Week and let the season run itself.

Default Week is a round template: you configure which day of the week, what tee time, which course, which group, how many holes, and what the max player count is. Once set, rounds auto-generate on that schedule — every Saturday at 8:00 AM, Front 9 at Pinecrest, Saturday Men's Stableford, max 20 players — until the end of the season or until you tell it to stop.

Individual rounds can still be modified without affecting the template. If one Saturday is a scramble instead of stroke play, change that round. If the tee time shifts for a tournament week, adjust it. The template stays intact; the exception is a one-off.

You can skip weeks too — holidays, course closures, rainy season breaks. Navigate to that round on the schedule and mark it cancelled. Nobody shows up expecting a round that isn't happening.

✓ Set It Up Before Your Season Starts

Configure Default Week before your first round of the season. Coming back to it mid-season is fine, but any rounds that didn't auto-generate before you set it up will need to be created manually. Five minutes at the start of the season saves a lot of catch-up work in month three.

7. Signup Controls: You're in Charge

Signup management is more flexible than it looks. Here's the full toolkit.

Auto-open — Set a specific date and time for signups to open. Players get notified and the signup button activates automatically. Great for “signups open Monday at 9 AM” discipline.
Auto-close — Set a cutoff: “Signups close Thursday at midnight.” After that point, the signup button locks. You still have an admin override (see below).
Manual control — Open or close signups from the admin view at any time, overriding any scheduled times. Useful for moving fast on short-notice rounds.
Max players cap — Once the round hits this number, signups lock for non-admin users. The cap respects the tee sheet.
Admin add/remove override — As an admin, you can add or remove players regardless of whether signups are open, closed, or capped. Use this for the unavoidable late additions and withdrawals.

⚠ Closing Signups Doesn't Remove Players

Closing signups stops new players from adding themselves — it doesn't touch the existing signup list. Everyone already signed up stays signed up. If someone needs to be removed after close, use the admin override to remove them manually. And if you need to add a late request after close, the override handles that too.

8. Messaging Setup

Your Golf Group handles most player communication automatically — round creation notifications, signup confirmations, results posts. Your job is to configure what the system says and when, and to send the occasional manual broadcast.

Welcome email — Sent when a player accepts their invite and creates their account. Customize this to reflect your group's personality. Include any standing information: dress code, pace of play expectations, how the skins pot works. This is the first thing new players read — make it count.
Round notifications — Automatically sent when new rounds are created. Players receive a notification with the date, time, course, and a link to the signup. You control the timing (e.g., notify players two weeks before each round).
Admin broadcast — Send a manual email or SMS to your entire organization, a specific group, or just the players signed up for a specific round. Use this for weather cancellations, rule changes, trophy announcements, or any news that can't wait for the next round.

Keep your welcome email updated. It's easy to set it once during setup and forget it, but it's the first impression new players get. Revisit it at the start of each season.

9. Understanding Handicaps and Counting Eligibility

Handicaps in Your Golf Group update automatically after every posted round. You don't touch them — the system handles the recalculation. But understanding how counting eligibility works will save you questions from players who are confused about whether they're “in” or “out.”

Each group has counting rules: you must play a minimum number of rounds within a rolling window (e.g., 4 of the last 6 rounds) to be counted toward the medal leaderboard or season standings. Players who don't meet the threshold are still welcome to play — their scores are tracked, their handicap updates, and they show on the round leaderboard. They just don't count toward season-aggregate results.

The system calculates each player's eligibility automatically. When a player signs up for a round, they can see whether they're currently counting or not. As an admin, you can override eligibility if needed — for illness, special circumstances, or the player who missed a week for their kid's graduation and doesn't deserve to lose their medal standing over it.

10. After Your First Season: Reports and History

By the time your first season ends, you'll have a complete archive: every round, every score, every handicap movement, every leaderboard position. It builds automatically. You didn't have to do anything extra for it to exist.

The Reports section pulls together season summaries: rounds played per player, average scores, handicap trajectory, and the rewards leaderboard showing who played the most, scored the best, and contributed the most to the group. Individual round history is queryable by player — useful for handicap disputes, for identifying trends, or just for settling the argument about who's had the best season.

If you're coming from another system and have historical data to bring in, the data import feature lets you load years of round history so it doesn't disappear. Read the data import guide here. Our team can also do the import for you if the data lives in a spreadsheet — just send it over.

The first time you close out a round and watch handicaps update, leaderboards refresh, and reward points land — you’ll wonder how you ever ran this out of a spreadsheet.

That's the full picture. If you're still in setup mode and haven't created your organization yet, start here — it's free to begin. If you just need the quick version for getting round one live, the Lift Off quick start guide has you covered in nine steps.

The Complete Setup Guide: Getting Your Golf Organization Running Right