Here we go.
Again.
For the second straight year, a new live scoring service is here, but the debut of this year’s system went much, much, much better than last year’s.
It’s been well documented how Spikemark, started by former UCLA coach Derek Freeman, earned the contract for live scoring and rankings last year, but by the end of the first day, Spikemark wasn’t working and was a failure.
Enter Clippd, the London-based company who in some degrees saved the college golf season. On the other hand, so did Golfstat, which as it had for more than three decades, provided live scoring and was a familiar site for coaches, players, fans and others who enjoy college golf when looking up scores from the biggest tournaments of the year.
While Clippd hosted the stats, results, and rankings, Golfstat was the company doing the majority of the live scoring. However, Clippd and its platform Scoreboard have taken the reigns this year for live scoring.
And it’s off to a much better debut than Spikemark last year. However, it wasn’t a flawless debut.
Scoreboard’s platform offers a more modern leaderboard and platform than Golfstat did, but it has been a difficult adjustment period for coaches and others to get used to the new software and even the new look.
Golfweek got a sneak peek at the Scoreboard technology this summer, which was tested numerous times to prove it actually worked and not repeat last year’s situation. The demonstration went through the basics of live scoring from the backend of the program, how it appears on the website and more.
It was hard to expect Scoreboard to be perfect from day one, but some of the issues that have happened early on are player’s names showing up multiple times on a leaderboard, school’s names not appearing next to a player and issues for coaches when trying to do qualifying rounds.
Another problem is the accessibility to course and player stats, including last year’s schedules, results and ranking that Clippd no longer has on its Scoreboard website. When trying to access a player or team to view specific stats, users are presented a screen that says, “Want to see more detailed player insights?” That insinuates SIDs, fans, media and more will have to pay a subscription fee to Clippd/Scoreboard to see basic stats and information that for decades has been open to everyone. All of that information was free on Golfstat.
The live scoring portion of Scoreboard should improve as time goes on. Even last week when the first events were underway, Clippd’s employees were actively working on errors to improve the platform and make it more streamlined and easy to use.
