organiser · 29 October 2026 · By Simon Berriman, Founder of Caddie Live

How to Plan Your Golf Society's 2027 Season

How to Plan Your Golf Society's 2027 Season

The societies that have a good year are the ones that did the boring part in November.

That sounds like a platitude until you have tried to book a decent course for a Saturday in June having started in March. The dates are gone, the price is higher, and you end up at a venue nobody chose for a day that feels like a compromise. Meanwhile the society down the road sent out a full fixture list before Christmas, took entries in January, and spent the season playing golf instead of chasing people.

This is the plan for doing the November version. It takes an evening.

If you are setting a society up rather than running an existing one, start with the complete guide to starting a golf society and come back to this.

Work backwards from the dates that matter

Before you pick venues, pick the shape of the year. Most societies land on somewhere between six and ten fixtures, and the right number is the one your members will actually turn up to.

Six is a comfortable minimum. Below that there is not enough rhythm for a season to feel like one, and a season-long competition has too few results to mean much. Twelve is the practical ceiling for most groups, because beyond monthly you are competing with everything else in people's diaries and your turnout per event starts to fall.

Eight or nine works for most societies: roughly monthly through the season with a gap in the depths of winter, plus the away trip.

Then place them. A few things worth knowing before you start ringing clubs.

Book the away trip first. It is the hardest thing to move, the most expensive thing to get wrong, and the thing people build their own holidays around. Everything else can flex around it.

Avoid the obvious clashes. Bank holidays look appealing and are the worst value of the year. Big football and rugby fixtures will cost you a third of your field. School holidays cut both ways depending on your membership.

Mix the venues. A season where every round is at the same course is cheaper and duller. One or two marquee days that cost more, a handful of good-value regulars, and somewhere new that people have not played.

Get the first one in early. An opening fixture in March or April, even a modest one, sets the tone and gets the subs collected. A season that starts in June never quite gets going.

Ring the clubs in November, not March

Society bookings are a club's bread and butter for midweek and shoulder-season tee times, and the good ones are reserved early by societies who have done this before.

What to ask for when you call:

• The society package rate per head, and exactly what is in it. Coffee and a bacon roll on arrival, the round, a two-course meal afterwards is the standard shape. Typical UK society rates run from around £30 to £80 a head depending on course and season.
• How many tee times they will hold, and the deadline for confirming final numbers.
• The deposit and the cancellation terms. Get these in writing. A club that wants a non-refundable deposit in December for a June date is asking you to carry the risk of your own turnout.
• What they will throw in. A free place for the organiser, range balls, course planners, a drink with the meal. Midweek society business is competitive and most clubs will sweeten a booking if you ask. If you do not ask, you do not get.

Book provisionally where you can, confirm when your numbers firm up in January, and keep a note of who you spoke to.

Decide the money before you publish anything

Two numbers, and they are not the same number.

The annual sub is what membership costs whether you play twelve times or twice. It covers the things the society needs regardless: trophies and engraving, the presentation night subsidy, a float for deposits, whatever your society spends on itself.

The entry fee is what a given day costs, and it should track what that day actually costs you.

Keeping them separate matters more than the amounts. Societies that roll everything into one annual figure end up with the members who play twice a year subsidising the ones who play twelve times, and sooner or later somebody notices and it becomes a conversation nobody enjoys.

If you are raising either for 2027, say why when you announce it. "Green fees are up about eight per cent and we have held subs flat since 2024" is an argument that lands. A new number with no explanation generates a thread.

Collect entries up front rather than on the day. The organiser who is chasing four people for £45 on the first tee is not enjoying their round, and a club that needs final numbers on the Tuesday does not care that two of your members are unreliable.

Entry fees in Society Caddie are collected through your own Stripe account when members register, so the money is in before the day rather than being chased on it. Caddie Live charges 5% of each paid entry, plus Stripe's own card fees.

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Settle the season competition now, not in April

If you run an order of merit, and you should, the rules need to exist before the first card is signed. Deciding how many rounds count after three events have been played is how you end up with an argument you cannot win.

Five things to write down:

1. The scoring model. Best N Stableford suits most societies.
2. How many rounds count. About two thirds of your fixtures. Nine events, count the best six.
3. The minimum to qualify. Four out of nine is reasonable. It stops somebody who played twice from topping a table for a season they were barely part of.
4. What happens with guests. Do they take a finishing place or get skipped for season scoring? Either is fine. Changing it mid-season is not.
5. The tie-breaks, in order. Most wins, then best single round, then events played.

There is a fuller treatment in how to run an order of merit for your season, but those five lines are the minimum.

Publish the whole thing in one go

Once you have dates, venues and prices, send the lot at once. Not a fixture a month as you confirm it.

A full-season announcement does something a drip feed cannot: it lets a member sit down with their own calendar and commit to six days in one sitting. That is how you get your turnout for the year, in January, before anything else claims those Saturdays.

Include the date, the venue, the cost, the format and the entry deadline for every fixture. Then put it somewhere people can find it again without asking you, because a fixture list that lives in one email from January is a fixture list that generates forty "when is the next one?" messages by April.

A November checklist

• Decide the number of fixtures and roughly which months
• Book the away trip
• Ring clubs for the other dates and get packages in writing
• Set the sub and the per-event fee, with a reason if either moves
• Write down the five order of merit rules
• Confirm your officers are continuing, at the AGM if you hold one
• Publish the full fixture list before Christmas
• Open entries for the first two events in January

Eight things. One evening, one round of phone calls, and the season is set.

Everything on that list, the members, the fixtures, the entries, the payments and the standings that come out of them, is what Society Caddie was built to hold in one place. Set up your 2027 season, put the fixtures in, and share one link so members can register and pay themselves. Scoring on the day runs on Caddie Live, and each confirmed result rolls into the season standings without anyone touching a spreadsheet. It is free while we are in beta.

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