Maxing The Crow – Introduction

Golf Crow Blog | Introduction

Why Golf Crow?

Golf Crow the app began in 2017. The idea for it came about because one, I like keeping track of when, where and who I play with and two, some of my buddies kept crowing, without evidence, that they were having their way with me on the course. “You’re a pigeon”, “you’re my ATM”, “thank you for the endless donations”, blah, blah, blah. I’ll show them, I figured.

Tracking the matches we played was not an easy task. There was a team match and indies for different stakes, strokes to allocate, presses, junk, doubling, and between 17 and 18, multiple “Aloha” bets to calculate. Did I relish going into accounting mode before playing the final hole? Certainly not. Many times, two players kept score and compared cards every so often to keep things straight. Now you’re reconciling. I preferred to focus on keeping the golf shots straight and on most days my game needed all the help it could get.

The competition could be fierce. And the numbers we played for, big or small, didn’t matter – everyone wanted to win. Here’s a golfer satisfaction diagram I came up with, might it apply to you too?

After the round we’d huddle up and even use napkins to tally damages. Back home I built a giant spreadsheet to track everyone’s wins and losses and discovered two things. First, keeping the sheet was a major pain and it was hard to compare players. More importantly, a careful audit of the card usually revealed a mistake. Score added wrong, strokes misassigned, presses screwed up, damages tallied incorrectly. It meant we were possibly posting a wrong score and/or someone made out better or worse financially than they should have. And the rule was, once you left the course, that was it. Oh, you forgot to count the double or add in the Aloha? Sorry, books are closed.

I enjoy automating things too and there was a time when my technology teams helped transform entire businesses; fixed-income and foreign exchange at Salomon Brothers, then mortgage-backed securities at Deutsche Bank. Pretty cool stuff, soup to nuts. Trade capture, risk management, profit/loss, confirms, netting, payments, bank rec’s, the works.

Put the two together, golf scoring issues fused with a passion to automate, and presto, Golf Crow was born.