Pops · Golf software for groups
Somebody in your group does all of it. The tee times, the teams, the scoring, the forty dollars at the end.
Pops runs all of it. Twenty Thursday nights, a Saturday game, or a four-day trip.
The first one is a form. The next one is last year’s with the dates changed.
Enter the players one time. They stay entered. Names, and who plays with whom out of habit. That standing thing is your club. It does not have to be a real one. Eleven guys who have played the same weekend since 2012 is a club.
A league night. A Saturday choose-up. A shotgun scramble with a hundred players. Four days with rounds and teams and a cup. Whatever shape it takes, it is an Event. The rounds, the games, the money and the field all live there. Nothing about your group gets entered twice.
One link and one password into the group text. They open it. They are in. No accounts, nothing to download, nobody invited one at a time.
Start from last year and change what changed. Add a Sunday round. Drop the cornhole. It shows you every change before it makes one.
Nobody hunts for a next button. The card moves on when the hole is done.
Nobody recalculates. Fix a score at nine o’clock and the round board is already right.
The games, the scoring, the standings, the side bets, who has paid and who has not. That is the pops.
The part that has to work in bright sun, one-handed, in a hurry.
One man in each group keeps the card. Tap a number and it is on everybody’s leaderboard before the pencil is down. That is the easy part.
What matters is the leaderboard. Overall, by team, by group. Skins as they stand. Who has closest to the pin on the third right now, and how many times it has changed hands all day.
Put the leaderboard on a screen and it stops being your job to answer questions about it. A laptop on a beer cooler at a league night. The television behind the bar. The one in the rental house on a trip. The round explains itself while everybody eats.
The leaderboard carries the money too. Who is up on skins. Who is holding a closest to the pin. What each is worth if the round ended right now.
A pop is a stroke you give away so the match is worth playing. Pick the game. Pick the pops. The arithmetic is not your problem.
What you’re playing
Stroke play. Two-man best ball, or the best two balls of four. Two-man and four-man scramble. Match play with points and halves. A drafted team cup that runs across every round of a trip. A knockout bracket for whatever you play once the golf is over.
What you’re playing for
Skins, gross or net. A hole nobody wins carries to the next one.
Closest to the pin, long drive, longest putt, on whichever holes you want them. Each group claims its own. The man on the tee knows what he has to beat.
Dots, if your group keeps them. Greenies, sandies, barkies, and whatever your group calls the other one.
The pops
Some groups play it straight. Gross scores, no strokes, low number wins. Any conversation about handicaps happens in the parking lot.
Some give strokes the ordinary way. Net skins, net best ball, an allowance off the index, applied where it should be and nowhere else.
Some hand a man his strokes up front instead of burying them in a card. He starts two under in a stroke round. The leaderboard says so. Everyone sees the deal before the first tee shot, which is the only time anyone has ever agreed about a handicap.
And some give strokes in shapes that are not strokes at all. A mulligan sold on the first tee. Something a man spends on one hole of his choosing. Something that moves a ball, or makes somebody play theirs again. Same job as a pop, handed over with considerably less dignity.
Four different ideas about what fair means. All four of them are pops.
The money
Every game that carries money carries a pot. The pot is a real object. Who is in it, what they put in, what comes out.
The pot runs as the round runs. At any point you can see what each man is owed if it stopped there. When the round closes those numbers become the real ones.
Sometimes a dollar does not move. A hole nobody won carries to the next hole. A contest nobody hit stays unclaimed and says so. A round that never happened gives the entrants their money back. Three different reasons, and all three get said out loud.
There is a Pay button and it is a link. It opens Venmo or PayPal or Zelle with the handle you typed in. Pops does not hold your money or move your money. It knows the number.
The draft, the teams, the cup, and the forty dollars you are still owed. Off your plate.
Some trips draft. Two captains, snake order, live on everybody’s phone. It is the best night of the trip and it deserves a real screen rather than a text thread and a legal pad. Somebody goes last. He will bring it up in March.
Then the cup runs the whole way. Teams carry points from round to round. The leaderboard is live while they play and the points land when the round is final. The last putt on Sunday actually decides something.
It knows who has paid and who still owes you forty dollars.
One link in April. Still works in September.
20 weeks.1 password.
A trip is four days. A league runs all season. Twenty weeks of it run as twenty separate events is twenty links and twenty passwords, about nineteen more than anybody wants.
So it is one link and one password for the season. Your members bookmark it in April. It still works in September.
Opening next week is one tap on a Wednesday night. Last week’s game, last week’s tee time and last week’s field all carry forward. You change what changed.
Season standings are there if you want them. Weeks finalize as they finish and the season board follows. Who is winning the league is a page, not a spreadsheet somebody’s brother-in-law maintains.
A men’s league, a couples event, a father-son, and a trip in October. One place.
If you run more than one thing, this is the part that matters. One console. One player pool. One place to look. Enter a man once and he is right in all of it.
It will look like yours. Your wordmark on the door, your line underneath it, the name of your cup, the year you started. Fourteen years of the same weekend in August ought to be on the page they open on Saturday morning. Putting it there is a form, not a project.