Last Friday, I attended the third annual GIE Media Golf Outing (GIE is the parent company of Golf Course Industry). That’s a fancy way of saying the boss gave everybody the day off to come out and hack around a terrific little local public course.
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Frankly, I play in a lot of outings: chapter meetings, corporate events and fundraisers. Typically, these things take two formats. Format #1 is play your own ball, lie about your handicap and hope you get lucky on a closest to the pin. Format #2 is scramble with three other folks you’ve never met before where you hope that one is a long bomber off the tee and another gets red-hot with the putter. This allows you to sit in the cart and drink beer and still take home prizes.
Frankly, both formats are OK, but they get boring after a while. And both can be daunting for a novice player, particularly if their partners are deadly serious about the game.
That’s why I thought the modified scramble format we used at the GIE outing was so much fun. At least half of the 40 or so people in the event seldom, if ever, play, and the idea was to make it easy and fun for them. So, each foursome received the following “gifts” for the event:
- One mulligan per player.
- One “throw” per player that automatically added distance to the group’s best shot.
- One “kick” per player designed primarily to be used on the green.
- A three-foot piece of string to add “gimme” distance to putts. If you had six inches left on your putt, you cut six inches off the string and so on until you’d used up all your string.
There were small prizes for almost everything, but the real fun was constantly trying to figure out how to use all the “gifts.” Do we use a kick? Who’s a good softball player who can lob a throw close to the pin? How much friggin’ string do we have left? Again, for the novice player, this took the emphasis off the quality of their game and put it on teamwork. More importantly, it was a blast.
I talked with one colleague (who is definitely not a regular golfer) after the round and all she could talk about was how much fun it was and how should couldn’t wait to do it again. Contrast that with the feeling a lot of new players have after an event, which is typically “I sucked.”
Taking the pain out of the game can be a great way to bring new players in. I’m curious … what kinds of “just for fun” events do you do at your facility? Click through to the forum now to let me know.
