eventsscoring
Shotgun, Split Tee or One Tee?
How to pick a start for your golf event — shotgun, split tee or one tee — with the field-size arithmetic, the pace trade-offs and the mistakes that wreck a day.
How your field starts decides how your day feels. Get it wrong and you have a prize presentation to a half-empty room, or a first group finishing two hours before the last group turns.
There are exactly three options, and the right one is almost entirely a function of your field size and what has to happen afterwards.
The three starts
One tee
Everybody goes off the first tee, one group every few minutes.
Standard golf. Groups tee off at 8:00, 8:10, 8:20 and so on, play 1 through 18, and finish in the order they started.
Field it works for: up to about 40 players. Beyond that the last group is teeing off hours after the first.
Pace: best of the three. The course is never crowded, nobody is waiting on a group that started somewhere else, and rounds come in quickest.
Use it when: it’s a competition and the golf is the point — a club championship round, a qualifier, a medal. Also correct for any event where the field is small enough that the arithmetic works.
The cost: there is no shared moment. The first group is on their second beer before the last group makes the turn, and you cannot start a presentation until everyone is in.
Split tee
Two groups every few minutes — one off the 1st, one off the 10th, at the same time.
Also called a two-tee start or a split start. It halves your window: 18 groups off one tee takes three hours, and off two tees it takes 90 minutes.
Field it works for: 40 to about 90 players. This is the workhorse start for a decent-sized club event.
Pace: good, with one caveat — the two halves of the field meet at the turn, and if the intervals are tight you get a queue on the 1st and 10th tees around the same moment. Space them a minute wider than you would for a single tee.
Use it when: the field won’t fit a single tee and you still want a competition rather than a party. A member-guest, a two-day championship, a big invitational.
The thing to get right: the scorecards. Half your field starts on 10, and their card must say so. A group that starts on 10 and turns in a card written as if they started on 1 is the single most common scoring error in club golf, and it will be the last card you get and the one that decides a flight. (What belongs on the printed card.)
Shotgun
Every group starts at once, one group to a hole.
At 9:00 a horn goes, and 18 groups tee off simultaneously on 18 different holes. Everybody plays their own 18 holes from wherever they started and finishes at roughly the same time.
Field it works for: exactly as many groups as you have holes. Which is the arithmetic everyone gets wrong — see below.
Pace: worst of the three in absolute terms; the course is completely full for the whole round, so it plays slower than the same field spread out. But it’s the only start where the whole field finishes together, which is worth more than pace for a lot of events.
Use it when: the event is a social occasion with golf in it. Charity days, company outings, member-guest dinners, anything with a banquet, a raffle, an auction or a speech. The shared start and the shared finish are the format’s entire value.
The cost: you need the whole course for the window, which means the club has to close to members. That’s why charity outings are on Mondays and why the club will charge you accordingly.
The arithmetic nobody does until it’s too late
A shotgun seats one group per hole. 18 holes, one group each, four to a group = 72 players. That is the ceiling on an 18-hole course. Not a guideline — a ceiling.
So if you’ve sold 100 spots, you have three options and only three:
- Put five in a group instead of four. 18 × 5 = 90. Works fine in a scramble, where a fifth player costs almost no time. Terrible in an own-ball format.
- Run a double shotgun — two groups per hole, an A and a B group, with B starting from a forward tee or waiting a few minutes. Doable, and messier: the club has to agree, the pace is slow, and you’ll need to brief every group.
- Switch to a split tee and accept that you don’t get the shared finish.
Work this out in week one, not the week of. Selling 100 spots for a 72-player shotgun is the most common way a charity outing goes wrong.
Nine-hole events scale the same way: 9 holes = 9 groups = 36 players for a shotgun, which is why a nine-hole league night is usually a split tee off 1 and 5.
A quick decision table
| Field | Start | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 40 players | One tee | Best pace, no complications |
| 40–90, competition | Split tee | Halves the window, keeps it a golf event |
| Up to 72, social event with a dinner | Shotgun | Everyone finishes together |
| 72–144, social event | Double shotgun or split tee | Do the arithmetic before you sell the spots |
| Over 144 | Two waves (morning/afternoon) | It’s two events. Plan it as two. |
The four things that go wrong
1. The cards don’t say the start hole. Fix it by printing it on every card, next to the group.
2. Nobody knows where they’re going. A shotgun needs a person with a list at the carts, and the hole number on the cart sign. “You’re on 14” said once, out loud, per group.
3. The horn is late. A shotgun that starts ten minutes late finishes ten minutes late, and the whole point was the schedule. Get people out.
4. Scoring assumes hole 1 is first. A group starting on 12 plays 12 through 18, then 1 through 11 — so their ninth hole of the day is hole 2. Any scoring system, paper or digital, has to handle that, and any person tallying at the end has to remember it.
Where the app fits
Swilkin builds the tee sheet from the start you pick — one tee, split tee or shotgun — and lays out the groups for you: one tee stacks them at your interval off the first hole, a split tee alternates them between the first hole and the middle of the span (hole 1 and hole 10 on a full 18, hole 1 and 5 on a nine), and a shotgun seats one group per hole all at the same time.
And it does the arithmetic you were going to get wrong. Ask for a shotgun with more groups than there are holes and it refuses with the number and the two real fixes, rather than quietly producing a broken sheet:
“A shotgun start seats one group per hole — 22 groups over 18 holes (1–18). Put more golfers in each group, or send them off in tee times.”
Every group’s printed card carries its start hole, its tee time and its group, so the card is correct for a group that begins on 12. And scoring is per-group and hole-numbered, so a group starting on 12 enters hole 12 first and the board doesn’t care.
Set up an event · running a charity outing · free for golfers.
More organizer reading: how to run a club golf tournament and the weekly outing walkthrough.