One of my three home courses came out with some new scorecards this year. Actually they aren’t even cards, they’re booklets from MyLoopCard.
The concept
My director of golf told me he saved $1800 in scorecard printing costs by having MyLoopCard make the course’s cards. These days, saving even $18.00 helps. Good on him for finding a way to save money and keep the course in business.
MyLoopCard sells advertising to local vendors and puts them along with ads for their own online score tracking system (which says it is offline until fall of 2009) in the booklet.
Along with the ads are hole by hole diagrams of the course. This is quite helpful for players who haven’t been to the course before.
The color booklet is very impressive and classy.
The problems
So the course has saved on printing costs and the player gets the benefit of a nice booklet with hole by hole information on the course. Great.
But… there’s a big waste of paper. I do the scores for my men’s club, and we throw away the equivalent of hundreds of pages of paper every week. That’s just the Tuesday league. Over the course of a year we’re talking a serious amount of lumber being consumed and thrown away by the course. Personally I don’t care that much, but the tree huggers might have a problem with all the paper waste. Maybe the paper is recycled but I didn’t see anything mentioning that.
Problem two is the paper itself. Obviously nobody actually “tested” the cards. The cards are impressive with their full color print, yes, but the paper is coated. This makes writing on the cards with a pencil nearly impossible. I brought a buddy to my course last week and when he tried to write on the cards with a golf pencil the first words out of his mouth were “these score cards suck.” The photo above is a typical card I receive when I do my league scores. They started out in pencil and had to switch to pen.
Conclusion
Great concept but needs to switch to non coated paper for the scorecard portion!
HOGWire – Golf Industry News
Hi I always enjoyed your site.
I just signed up to give you some thought to your idea.
As an inventor and an engineer; I believe you are looking at this the wrong way. Don’t change the card. Change the writing tool. If it is laminated use something like a grease pencil. Then you can reuse the card after you wipe it off.
Great idea. I’m sure the golf course wouldn’t mind supplying grease pencils instead of regular golf pencils. Reusable cards would save trees too.
🙂
Tony a simple fix that I would suggest is to just put a perf on the score card page and that way the players can keep the booklet with all the course info and ads and they just tear out the score card and turn that in, only one sheet of paper like in the old days. Simple really. Could even add a page for notes to keep on the round for future reference. Anything done to try to make them more permanent like lamination or whatever just is too expensive.
Tony. Thanks for the article about MyLoopCard. The feedback has been very helpful. We currently are addressing a variety of the comments you made. We would like to start a recycling program at all if out partnered golf courses nationwide. The issue with writing on the scorecard with a pencil has been addresses and will not happen again. The reuseable scorecard is a facsinating idea. We could cut down on the amount of scorecards – hence paper waste with a eraseable type wax pencil. All great input. The tracking website btw will be up in a few weeks. If you would like to offer free memberships to your bloggers please let me know. Great site. Thanks for the input.
Chad Hanysh
MyLoopCard