Guide

What to look for in a youth golf scoring app

Most golf apps are built for a golfer keeping their own score and tracking their own game. A youth match is different. The person holding the card usually isn’t playing, is often keeping score for the first time, and is responsible for three or four kids at once. The coach needs the numbers afterwards, from every group, added up correctly. Those two jobs ask different things of an app.

What the scorekeeper needs

• Nothing to sign up for. A parent handed a card at the first tee won’t make an account, and shouldn’t have to.
• One tap per swing. Counting is the whole job. Finding a box, typing a number and adding a column are where mistakes come from.
• Big targets, one hand. The other hand is holding a card, a drink, or a steering wheel.
• No signal needed. Golf courses have dead spots, and the round can’t stop for one.
• The league’s pick-up limit, shown. If the league caps a hole at double par, the app should say so and stop counting there.
• An easy fix. Somebody always taps twice. Correcting it should take seconds, not a menu.
• A card to hand back. Totals per hole and per round, readable at a glance, ready to copy onto the official card or send to the coach.

What the coach needs

• A roster kept between matches, so groups aren’t rebuilt from memory every week.
• Groups made ahead of time, following the rules the league and the coach actually use: group size, someone experienced in each group, a parent with each group, girls, who shouldn’t play together.
• A simple way to get each group’s card to its scorekeeper without the scorekeeper installing anything.
• Scores as they happen, not a stack of cards to add up in the parking lot.
• The team score the league uses, whether that’s every round or the best four.
• Other schools, without handing over a roster. A shared match should share the names playing that day and nothing more.

Questions worth asking of any app

• Does the scorekeeper need an account, or a download from an app store?
• What happens to scoring when the phone loses signal on the fourth hole?
• Who can see the children’s names, and for how long?
• What does it cost the parent keeping score? What does it cost the coach, and does it renew on its own?

How GolfJot handles it

For the scorekeeper, GolfJot is a scorecard that runs in the phone’s browser, with no account and nothing to download. Each player is a whole-width row. Tap the row each time that player swings, and the running total adds itself up. A penalty stroke is one more tap. The screen shows the pick-up number for the hole, and when a player reaches it the row says HAVE THEM PICK UP and stops counting. A wrong tap is fixed by setting that player’s number directly, and you can step back to an earlier hole.

With a code from the coach, the card arrives already set up: course, holes, pars and the pick-up rule. The scorekeeper taps the hole the group starts on and begins. Typing the code needs signal once. After that, scoring works in a dead spot, and each hole goes to the coach when the phone finds signal again. Without a code, the scorekeeper can set up a card by hand, and it never needs a signal at all.

For the coach, the coach area keeps the roster, suggests groups from rules the coach turns on or off, and gives the match a short code to hand out. Scores come in hole by hole as each group plays, and the results screen adds up the team score by the league’s rule: every player’s round, or the best few from each school. When several schools play together, each coach marks which of their own players are available, and the host sees only those names.