Running a Multi-Week League at Your Facility, Using SimCap Seasons
A simulator facility reached out to us recently with a plan for their first real league: five weeks, a qualifying round to set the field, a different course every week, and real cash on the line for the top finishers. It's a great format, and it's exactly what SimCap's Seasons feature was built for. Here's how to set one up.
The format
A multi-week league doesn't need to be complicated. The version we keep seeing work well looks like this:
- A qualifying round to get everyone playing and establish the field
- A handful of weekly rounds, each on its own course, played any time during that week's window
- A small entry fee covering the whole league, with bay time billed separately by the facility
- A payout split among the top finishers at the end
Nine holes a week keeps each round approachable, lets you rotate through more courses over the season, and fits easily into a golfer's schedule, no need to block off time for a full 18.
Why Seasons
In SimCap, a Season is just a wrapper around a sequence of individual events at your facility. Each week is its own event with its own course, so you can send players to a different signature course every week, a desert track one week, a coastal course the next, without that being a separate, disconnected tournament each time. The Season ties the weeks together and tracks standings across all of them automatically.
You can also choose to count only a player's best finishes rather than every single week, so one off week doesn't sink someone's whole season. That's a setting at Season creation, not something you have to manage by hand.
What to know about the handicap
Here's the honest version, because it matters for how you set expectations with your players: SimCap's real handicap index needs three logged rounds before it kicks in. That's not a facility-specific thing, it's the same rule everywhere in the app. So for a brand new group, your qualifying round and first couple of weeks will likely play out as gross scoring while everyone builds up real history, and net/handicap scoring kicks in once players cross that threshold.
If any of your players already carry an official GHIN handicap, they can link it and get real net scoring from week one. For everyone else, think of the early weeks as the season establishing a legitimate baseline rather than everyone already having one on day one. It's a small tradeoff for a number people can actually trust by the back half of the league.
Setting it up
Only your group's Creator or an Admin can start a season, and a group can only have one active season running at a time. Each week's event gets created like a normal tournament, with a toggle to tie it into the season, so you pick that week's course same as always, it just also feeds the season standings. Points are awarded by where each player finishes each week, and if you turned off "every event counts," only their best finishes factor into the final standings, a skipped or off week just doesn't count against them.
For the full walkthrough, see How to Run a Season in SimCap.
No spreadsheets, no manual handicap tracking, and your players get a running leaderboard they can check themselves instead of waiting on an email after each week.
Thinking about running something like this at your facility? Reach out and we're happy to help you get it set up before your season starts.