How to Organise a Golf Society: The Complete Playbook

Four roles cover most of what a society needs, and it’s worth naming them properly rather than leaving everything to whoever shouts loudest in the group chat.

The captain sets the tone for the year: picks the theme for the away day, leads on course selection, and is the face of the society when you’re dealing with a club professional or a venue. The secretary is the one actually doing the work, sending fixture reminders, chasing RSVPs, booking tee times and keeping a record of who’s played what. The treasurer collects subs, pays deposits, and tells the committee, honestly, when the prize pot won’t stretch to a trophy engraving. The handicapper, or whoever takes that job on, updates scores after every round and keeps individual handicaps roughly fair, which matters more than people expect once real money is riding on the Saturday four-ball.

You don’t need four different people for a small society of a dozen mates. One person can happily wear two hats. What doesn’t work is nobody holding any of them, because that’s when tee times get missed and the same three people end up doing everything by default, then quietly resenting it.

A single WhatsApp group works fine for the first dozen members. Past that, it turns into noise: fixture details buried under banter, a photo dump from the last away day pushing the actual tee time off everyone’s screen, and at least one member who swears they never saw the message about Saturday’s 8am start.

The fix isn’t necessarily leaving WhatsApp altogether. Plenty of societies still run their banter there, and that’s part of the fun. It’s giving the important stuff, the tee times, the RSVPs, the results, a home that isn’t a scrolling chat feed. Some societies keep a pinned document. Others move the actual organising into a group golf app and leave WhatsApp for what it’s good at: chat, photos and stitching people up about a shank into the trees on the 14th.

Membership itself needs a bit of structure too. Decide early whether you’re an open society, where anyone can turn up if there’s space, or a closed one with a waiting list, and write it down somewhere new members can actually find. A society with forty names on a spreadsheet and no clarity on who’s still active is a society about to have an awkward conversation about numbers on the morning of the summer major.

Money is where societies fall out, more often than form or favouritism. Sort it early and put it in writing where every member can see it.

A treasurer’s job isn’t to be popular. It’s to be able to say, instantly, exactly where every pound has gone.

Most societies run three separate pots:

• An annual sub, typically £20 to £40, covering the boring costs: an app subscription if you use one, a bit of admin, maybe a trophy engraving.
• A per-round green fee, paid to whoever fronts the booking, usually the secretary or treasurer.
• A small prize pot, often just £5 a round chipped in on the day, funding the nearest-the-pin and the winner’s pot without anyone chasing invoices afterwards.

Keep a float too. A treasurer who’s fronted £600 for a twelve-ball booking and is waiting on eleven separate bank transfers will not enjoy the next committee meeting. A running float of a few hundred pounds, topped up from subs, lets them book and pay up front without personally bankrolling the society every time the fixture list gets busy. And whatever system you use, write the numbers down somewhere everyone can see them. Nothing kills a society faster than a rumour that the treasurer is sitting on cash nobody can account for.

The single best thing a society secretary can do is book the season’s tee times in January, before the good Saturday slots at your regular course disappear into member bookings and the odd wedding.

A working fixture list usually has a rhythm to it: a regular monthly or fortnightly round at the home course, two or three away days at courses nobody in the group has played before, and a small handful of majors, a captain’s day, maybe a president’s day or a club championship, that carry a bit more weight and a bit more prize money. Space the away days out. Clustering three trips into six weeks in high summer is how you end up with half the group unable to make any of them.

Publish the whole list at the start of the season, not one fixture at a time. People plan their summers around family holidays and long-booked weekends, and a society that only ever announces the next round a fortnight out will always be scrapping for numbers. Once it’s published, treat it as fixed unless the weather forces your hand. Chopping and changing dates is one of the fastest ways to lose the members who joined for a bit of predictable structure in their golfing year.

Format matters more than most new committees realise. Get it wrong and your low-handicappers drift away because it’s never competitive, while your high-handicappers give up because they can’t get near the prize table.

Stableford is the standard for a reason: it uses each player’s handicap on every hole, so a blow-up on one hole doesn’t wreck the whole card, and it keeps mixed-ability fields genuinely competitive. We cover how to run a Stableford day properly, along with a breakdown of scrambles and other team formats for away days, elsewhere on the blog, so we won’t repeat all of it here.

The short version for a new society: use individual Stableford for most regular rounds, since it needs the least explaining and rewards everyone fairly regardless of ability. Save team formats like scrambles or better-ball for away days and majors, where the social side matters as much as the score. And whatever format you choose, agree the rules before anyone tees off, not on the 9th green when someone’s querying whether a gimme counts.

Most societies aren’t affiliated to a golf union, so members don’t always have an official WHS handicap to lean on. That’s fine. You don’t need one to run fair competitions, but you do need something consistent.

The simplest approach is a trend-based society handicap, built from a player’s own recent scores rather than a one-off assessment:

1. Take a player’s last eight or so qualifying scores.
2. Average the better half of them to smooth out one bad round.
3. Adjust the handicap gently after each new score rather than resetting it from scratch.
4. Review the whole list every few rounds, not after every single one.

If some of your members do carry an official WHS handicap, use it as their starting point and let the society trend take over from there. It keeps things fair between the members who play twice a week at their home club and the ones who only ever play with the society.

Add it up and running a society properly means tracking a fixture list, a membership roll, subs and payments, live scores on the day, a handicap trend and a leaderboard or two. Plenty of committees manage all of that across a WhatsApp group, a shared spreadsheet and whoever remembers to bring a pen for the card.

That works, until it doesn’t, usually right when the society is growing and you can least afford the admin to slip. This is where a group golf app earns its place. Foremates, for instance, puts the tee sheet, live scoring and leaderboard in one shared space the whole society can see, instead of six separate places only the secretary fully understands, and it’s currently running a Founding Member offer for groups who sign up early. It won’t replace a good captain or a treasurer who actually answers messages, but it does take the repetitive admin off one person’s plate, which is usually what burns committees out fastest.

If you’re weighing up moving your society onto an app for the first time, our support team can talk you through how a trial season with one group usually goes.