Organizing a Shotgun Start: The Checklist for a Chaos-Free Kickoff

Organizing a Shotgun Start: The Checklist for a Chaos-Free Kickoff

A shotgun start is genuinely clever: everyone tees off at the same time from different holes, and everyone finishes around the same time too – nobody's waiting two hours for the last group to come in. In theory. In practice, twenty people are standing in the parking lot at 7am with coffee in hand, and nobody knows which hole they're supposed to start at.

The trick is solving the confusion before the parking lot, not on it. Every group needs to know in writing (or better: digitally, so it's not stuck on a piece of paper in someone's car) which hole they're starting from. For bigger fields, a quick announcement or a sheet at the clubhouse helps too – there's always someone who only pulls out their phone once they're standing at the tee.

One detail people forget: not every hole takes the same time to play. Whoever starts on a short par 3 might finish faster than the group on the long par 5 – which can mean everyone still bunches up at the same spot later anyway. Planning realistically instead of assuming every group moves at the same pace helps here.

For scoring, the rule with a shotgun start is simple either way: what counts is the round played, not the order you teed off in. Sounds obvious, but it trips people up every time someone asks why the group that finished "first" isn't automatically leading the board.

Short version: sort out starting holes ahead of time, make them visible to everyone, build in realistic buffers – and all that's left of the shotgun start is the elegant part, not the parking-lot guessing game. That exact assignment is something you set up once in Tournament Caddie and everyone can see it, instead of it hanging as a sheet at the clubhouse.