Handling guests and visitors in society competitions
Should a guest appear on the leaderboard? Win the prize? Take a member’s place in the season table? The rules to decide before a guest shoots 42 points.
Updated 9 August 2026 · 5 min read · Flagstick team
Every society has this argument eventually, and it always happens on the day a guest shoots 42 points.
The argument is avoidable. It just has to be settled in February rather than in the bar in July.
The three decisions
1. Does a guest appear on the leaderboard?
Yes. They played the round, they should see their score on the board, and their playing partners should be able to see how the group is doing. Hiding a guest makes the live board wrong and makes the guest feel like an intruder.
Mark them visibly as a guest on the board. That single label prevents most confusion.
2. Can a guest win the day’s prize?
This is a genuine judgement call and both answers are defensible.
Guests eligible. Friendlier, and the natural reading of “whoever scores best wins”. Risk: a guest with a soft handicap wins your captain’s day and never returns.
Guests ineligible, prize goes to the best member. More common, and easier to defend. Usually paired with announcing the guest’s score anyway — “the best score today was actually our visitor with 42” — which gets you the goodwill without the awkwardness.
A middle path that works well: guests are eligible for a separate “best visitor” prize and not for the members’ prize. Everyone gets acknowledged, nothing is taken from anyone.
Whatever you choose, publish it before the season, and repeat it in the rules of the day. The rule is not the problem; discovering the rule after the fact is.
3. Do guests count in the season table?
No. The Order of Merit is a members’ competition. A guest who plays once cannot win a season, and should not affect one either.
But here is the technical trap, and it catches people who did everything else right.
The finishing-position trap
If your season points are derived from the round’s overall finishing position, then a guest finishing third pushes every member below them down one place — and therefore down one points bracket — for a season table the guest isn’t even in.
The board says:
| Position | Player | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | M. Duarte (member) | 40 |
| 2 | R. Silva (guest) | 39 |
| 3 | A. Walker (member) | 38 |
Duarte earns 25 for the win. What does Walker earn? If you read “3rd” off the board, Walker gets third-place points. But among members, Walker finished second, and second is what the season table should award.
The fix is to compute a member-only finishing position per round and use that for the season. It costs nothing to do and it is invisible when it is right, which is exactly why it stays broken for months when it is wrong.
If you run your season table in a spreadsheet, this means ranking a filtered list, not reading a position column. Setting up an Order of Merit covers the rest of the season-table decisions this interacts with.
Handicaps for guests
Guests bring a handicap index from their own club. You have no way to verify it and no history to sanity-check it against, which is the real reason many societies keep guests out of the prizes.
Two practical safeguards:
- Ask the member who invited them to confirm the index. Accountability sits with the member, which is the correct place for it.
- Cap guest playing handicaps at the same limit you apply to members, if you apply one.
Do not go further than this. A society that interrogates visiting handicaps stops having visitors.
Recording guests properly
Whatever system you use, a guest needs to be:
- On the field and in a group, so scores can be entered for them
- Visible on the live leaderboard, labelled as a guest
- Excluded from the season standings
- Excluded from member-only position calculations
- Attributable to the member who invited them
If your software cannot represent a guest as a distinct kind of participant, you will end up creating fake member records for visitors — and those fake members will show up in your season table two months later, which is a worse problem than the one you were solving.
A rule you can copy
Guests are welcome at all society rounds. A guest’s score appears on the day’s leaderboard and is eligible for the Best Visitor prize. The main competition prize and all Order of Merit points are for members only. Guest handicaps are confirmed by the inviting member.
Four sentences, and you never have this argument again.
Frequently asked questions
- Can a guest win a golf society competition?
- That is your society’s choice, but it must be made before the season rather than after a guest wins. The most common arrangement is that guests appear on the leaderboard and are eligible for a separate visitor’s prize, while the main competition prize and all season points are reserved for members.
- Should guests appear on the live leaderboard?
- Yes. They played the round and their playing partners want to see the group’s scores. Label them clearly as guests so nobody misreads the board. Keeping guests off the board makes the live scoring wrong and makes the visitor feel unwelcome for no gain.
- How do guests affect the Order of Merit?
- They should not affect it at all — but they will if season points are read from the round’s overall finishing position. Compute a member-only position for each round and award season points from that, otherwise a guest finishing third silently costs every member below them a place in the season table.
- What handicap should a guest play off?
- Their handicap index from their home club, converted to a playing handicap the same way you convert a member’s, and confirmed by the member who invited them. Apply any cap you apply to members. Going further than this — demanding evidence or adjusting visiting handicaps — costs you visitors and rarely changes a result.