Reply To: How do you get DQ'd playing within your handicap

[Jeffrey Barbas]

Shealy, I was a tournament director here at home for 5 years and on the board for another 5 years. I know a thing or two about running tournaments. I ran some of the best County Am’s that our area had ever seen. And after I stepped down it was just a matter of 3 years that our Association stopped functioning. I knew it was going to happen after I left the position. That being said, it was more about real golf than handicap crap. We use to have 3 divisions. AA(Scratch) A(5.0 to 9.9) and B(10.0 and above) when I took over. After taking over and getting little to no help from our board members I had to make changes to survive. Dropped the B flight since many were shooting A flight numbers. And it was a lot better pay outs when I only had to split the pot in half. If a player had to be moved we moved them up. We played the toughest courses from the tips in our area. A couple 7,000 yard courses and 6,800 for our County Am usually. I think I had the largest Scratch Division the years I ran it. Over 50%. Got a lot of college kids to come out and play with some of the best amateur golfers in our area. And the key is I made it affordable. I left office with $1,000 to the good in the account. Pretty good for absolutely no sponsorship money the last few years.

That’s the biggest issue I see in the World Am. The payout sucks. We pay $535 to have the chance to win a $600 gift card? Thankfully that’s not the whole reason we come here. Cause I haven’t placed anywhere near enough to recoup that kind of money. We all enjoy the competition or we wouldn’t be here. Fact still remains, they need to do something more for us players than keep driving the price up. But, do you really think they are doing this for free? And yet I can assure you they aren’t losing money or they wouldn’t keep doing it.