Some things I have noticed about leagues and changes that could be made so that things run smoother. Specifically for small clubs where most players choose not to use UDisc but still want to be a part of the leagues.
Our local club is quite small but growing. Most of the members have been playing for a long time and don’t care about UDisc so they don’t have accounts. We always “mob golf” no matter how many of us there are. If it’s a lot we play doubles. I think it would be helpful if other members of the league who use UDisc could create a “filler” account (similar to how you would for someone without the app on a non event card.) This would help so that if we decide to do random doubles we can have enough accounts that the teams can be created on the app correctly. I have been having to set it as a singles event and only keep score for teams where at least one team member has the app. Then I name the round with the name of those on the teams. This works but it does mess up things like stats and ratings.
The other thing has to do with layouts. Because we always mob golf and there are multiple pins for each hole our league chooses pin positions to play as we go. In an event, like leagues, you can’t do this. This leads to our scorecards being inaccurate and ratings getting messed up. It would be helpful for leagues but I can see why it is not an option for all events.
UDisc is great. I love to use it for almost every round I play. Unfortunately, I don’t think our club will be able to use the app for our leagues any longer. It is too complicated to set up for our small and unwilling club and the layouts are too inaccurate when we do get to use it. If both of these got changed I would be running a league twice a week, even if I happen to be the only one out of 10 people who actually use the app!
I have a similar small league with friends and family.
Tell your players to make UDisc accounts. If they don’t have an account, they don’t get a score. Period. They don’t have to keep score while they play, but if they aren’t willing to put in the minimal effort to create an account in the first place they don’t get a score. They can play the round with the league and hang out, but no official score.
We solved the layout problem by having the winner from this week pick the UDisc layout for next week as their reward. It provides some tiny stakes for our friendly league and gives ensures we’re always playing an official layout.
I like the fix for the layout problem! Good idea. However I still don’t think our league will be using UDisc for our league rounds. And “no UDisc no score” works for singles events, sure, but our problem is that, when it comes to doubles, we can’t actually create a doubles scorecard because there aren’t enough people who have the app. We always do random teams so it isn’t like all the people with UDisc are on teams and all the people without are on separate teams. I think it would be beneficial for UDisc to offer “extremely casual league events” where you could set rounds up the way I explained in the original post. Our league members are way too stubborn to sign up for an account too (even if it is free) and I’m sure our small town club isn’t the only one out there with this issue.
Thanks for the ideas though! Maybe I’ll try it again one day but I think our league is too casual for something as formal as a UDisc league.
My league started with 5 people who were all invested enough to get UDisc and keep score regularly. I think from that base it was easy to set an expectation of “If you want in, go get UDisc.” You’ve already got a standard operation though, so forcing change can be a challenge.
Do you have any money on the line for league? I’d for sure try to get things a bit more formal and organized if people are paying in for prize money.
We have an ace pot and some side bets every once in a while. But we do not play for cash every league round. Our leagues at the moment just act as a way for our club to have a couple days out of the week to get together and play a round. Only a handful of us use UDisc and actually care about the competition. Most of the guys aren’t the kind of people who want to be placing money on the line just to make it formal.
I think our club is going to have to stay the way it is until the next generation is able to step up and take over. You’ve given me some good ideas on where to start once that day does come.
If we had the super casual league option we could start right now as I’m willing to keep score, change holes as we go, and enter in names for everyone who doesn’t want to use the app. But since no one is willing to work with me and I’m not able to do all of that it just turns into a super complicated mess any time I try. Just going to keep using UDisc for only my scorecards and try to stay away from creating any new league events until we can get a majority of the club into using the app.