Scorecards making way for digital scoring

Coronavirus has encouraged the desire of clubs to move from using physical scorecards to digital scoring, says a golf computer software manager.

Craig Higgs, who is the managing director of Golf Genius Software, said with golf clubs continuing to adopt new safety protocols to reduce contact points in a bid to combat coronavirus, employing technology to keep track of your score was an obvious and easy-to-implement measure.

“There is definitely a very strong market force that is pushing the printed scorecard to one side,” Higgs said. 

“The desire and movement towards using the phone to score is super-charged.

“There’s no doubt that the market is being forced to move that way. We only see that movement as getting faster and we are significantly developing our application product to take advantage of that opportunity.” 

Higgs said contactless golf is the new normal with digital scoring among the elements being embraced by clubs and golfers around the planet.

“As people come back from the lockdown period, we know how important it is to keep golf safe,” Higgs added. 

“Typically, what we’re seeing across the 50 countries that we deal with is that golf is now generally moving to a state of being open – and clubs want to make sure it’s done in a socially responsible and contactless way.

“Across our country markets, we’re being asked to rapidly help clubs with their digitisation. They’re looking to reduce the traditional touch points in a golf event and that’s increased the demand for standard features that we have, like on-line registration, tee-time booking and live app scoring.

“We pride ourselves on the fact that tournament management is what we do. All day, every day, we’re there to make the task of creating golf events a lot easier and making sure that creating great golf events will bring back to clubs the revenue that everyone has lost in the last couple of months.”

As well as running some 500,000 golf events and more than 20 million rounds annually, Golf Genius is at the forefront of the world handicapping system, an initiative by The R&A and the United States Golf Association to introduce a single handicapping system to the world game.