Courses and scorecards

Over twelve thousand US courses, searchable with no signal at all, which matters more than it sounds when you're in a cart at the far end of the property.

Search by name or by town. It's forgiving about spacing and punctuation, so "westwoods" finds "West Woods" and "st andrews" finds "St. Andrews".

The card

A listing is a name and a place. To score properly Rivalry needs the scorecard: par and stroke index, hole by hole. Whoever plays there first photographs the card, checks the reading, and it's there for every group after them.

Stroke index is the one that moves money. Handicap strokes fall where the index says, so an app quietly guessing it is quietly changing who won. If nobody's added a card yet, Rivalry says so on the scoring screen instead of pretending. Strokes fall in hole order and the par is an assumption, both stated on the screen while you play.

Who owns the hole

Every hole at a course the group has played three times has an owner: whoever has made par or better there most often in the last ninety days. Frequency, not brilliance — the scratch player doesn't hold all eighteen, anyone can own one, and it lapses if you stop turning up. The course card shows an OWNER row under the stroke index and who owns the course (the most holes; a tie owns nothing). Tap a hole for how many pars the owner has and how close the next player is. A round page lists the holes it moved, the feed says who took what from whom, and whoever lost a hole hears about it.

Clubs with three nines

A 27-hole club prints its nines separately so any two can be combined. West Woods in Arvada plays Silo, Cottonwood and Sleeping Indian.

Photograph a card like that and Rivalry reads the nines by name, then asks which two you played and in which order. It's the only thing on the card a photo can't answer for itself.

The combination gets stored as its own eighteen with the indexes interleaved the way the printed combination cards do it. Your record book still shows one club. Play Silo/Cottonwood in June and Cottonwood/Sleeping Indian in July and it's the same place, with one owner and one running total, which is how your group thinks about it anyway.

Not listed?

Simulators, new builds, and whatever the directory's missed can be added by hand. A course added that way stays private to the group that invented it until somebody else corroborates it.