Ask a social golf club that has been going a decade where its results live. You will get a version of the same answer every time: a spreadsheet, on a laptop, belonging to whoever ran the club three organisers ago.
It is never a decision. Nobody sits down and elects to lose 2016. It goes like this.
- The founding organiser keeps a spreadsheet. It is genuinely good. He knows every quirk in it.
- He hands over to someone who cannot follow the formulas, and who starts a clean one.
- Two years of results now live only in the old file, on a laptop, in a cupboard.
- Somebody rebuilds the season table from the group chat, which scrolls back eleven months.
- Everything before that becomes a thing people remember rather than a thing you can look up.
The result is a club that has played four hundred rounds and can tell you who won last month and almost nothing else. Not who has the most wins. Not the lowest round anyone has shot at the home course. Not whether the bloke who has been turning up for eight years has ever actually won anything.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Because the history is most of what makes it a club rather than a recurring group booking. A social golf club has no course, no clubhouse and no letterhead. What it has is years of results and the stories stuck to them. That is the entire asset.
And it compounds the wrong way. The longer you go without a proper record, the less anyone believes there is one worth keeping, and the easier it is to skip typing up a result. Clubs do not decide to stop keeping records. They just gradually stop.
What actually protects it
Not a better spreadsheet. Three things:
- Somewhere results go by default, rather than because someone remembered.
- Something the next organiser can pick up without a handover document.
- An export, so the club owns its history instead of renting it from whoever is running things this year.
That last one applies to any software you choose, mine included. If you cannot get everything out in one click, you have not solved the problem — you have moved it somewhere with better fonts.
There is a version of this post that ends by telling you what to use. I have an obvious interest there, so I will leave it alone. The point stands whatever you pick: the records are the club, and most clubs are one dead laptop away from losing theirs.