INTRODUCING CROWDSOURCED GOLF

The first and only website offering customizable golf course rankings

Nov 19, 2024

As a passion project for the last several months, I built the first and only website offering customizable golf course rankings!

If this sounds interesting to you, check out Crowdsourced Golf HERE or go to www.crowdsourced.golf. If you want to know why I made this site, continue reading.

Crowdsourced Golf’s customizable rankings interface

Let me take you back a few years. I had just moved to Chicago with three other roommates who liked golf. We wanted to play together but didn’t know where to go. In my attempts to find the best courses near us, I ran into several challenges with the existing websites that rank and or map out golf courses. These sites felt outdated and didn’t provide the insights I was looking for. You can generally categorize the existing golf course rankings websites into one of two buckets: Detailed reviews of an incomplete list of courses, or a complete list of courses, usually on a map, without any substantive information on how they compare to each other. I was mainly frustrated with the following four points:

The rankings are always static, they don’t adjust for different golfers’ priorities
The list of courses in the rankings is hardly ever comprehensive
Most rankings methodologies are murky or uninformative
Geographic information is never paired seamlessly with detailed reviews

A master resource did not exist. There was not a site that gave you a comprehensive picture of the golf experience at a given course, the ability to compare that course to all others, and the ability to see where the course was located quickly. I felt something like this should exist, so I created it. Crowdsourced Golf is set up to be the ultimate site for finding and comparing public golf courses near you.

Allowing users to customize how the rankings are generated based on their own golfing preferences is the main differentiator of Crowdsourced Golf, but the site also solves for the three other issues with traditional course rankings websites I listed.

For now, I have only uploaded data from courses near Minneapolis/St. Paul, where I grew up. However, if this trial run is successful, I will begin including other major US metropolitan regions as well.

ISSUE 1: Rankings don’t adjust to what you are looking for in a round of golf

Your priorities for a round of golf can change drastically from week to week. If you wake up absolutely itching to play, you may not care too much about where you wind up since you’re just happy to be out there. But when your father-in-law is coming into town, suddenly finding a well-conditioned course becomes a much bigger priority.

Golf course rankings should be able to account for both of these scenarios and everything in between, but this customizability is nowhere to be found. The existing options are all static and far too focused on ranking courses by how impressive the golf course is, regardless of cost. I was frustrated by these unchanging and biased lists which is why I created the first-ever dynamic rankings engine for golf courses. Now, you can adjust the rankings based on what matters to you, and I know from personal experience that changes from round to round. This functionality is long overdue and revolutionizes golf course rankings. The user is now in control.

There are ten criteria you can fine-tune on Crowdsourced Golf. When generating your custom rankings, you can weight these different criteria however you would like, including ignoring some. The ten criteria available are:

Overall Enjoyment
Course Conditions
Value/Bang for Your Buck
Pace of Play
Tee Time Availability
Practice Facility
Walkability
Fun for All Skill Levels
Cost
Proximity to You

To supply the data for the rankings, users will submit their course reviews on Crowdsourced Golf as well.

ISSUE 2: Sites with course rankings never include every single course

Let’s consider the common situation I found myself in when reading through some publication’s course rankings list where the course I am interested in playing is missing. The following questions would immediately pop into my head: Is this course missing because it’s so bad that it wasn’t even worthy of making this list? Or it is missing because they’ve never played there? Why didn’t they play there? Where would it be ranked among these other options if they had played there?

Golfers shouldn’t have to deal with incomplete information when deciding where to play. Information about every single course should be available on a site related to ranking golf courses in that area. Yet, it’s surprisingly uncommon to see this. This issue plagues Golf Digest’s rankings. They release public course rankings by state regularly, but these lists only have about twenty courses per state and because the list is so short, they only feature the best courses in each state. These courses, which tend to have higher greens fees, are not the courses that your average person is looking to play on an open weekend.

I was surprised at how difficult it was to find information on every single golf course in the area, especially the budget options. There are a few sites that provide this, but they have other downsides which I’ll will get to shortly.

Even when you search on Google Maps, you aren’t shown every course in the area. Google returns what it thinks are the best results. But sometimes these courses are not what you’re looking for or you know they are always booked.

Crowdsourced Golf eliminates this incompleteness issue by storing data for every public golf course. I compiled a comprehensive list of public golf courses in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region, including nine-hole options. No course is excluded. My site shows you every possible place to play. You can filter this list down as you would like, but at least every option is available if you want it.

This feature adds the benefit that you can compare every course to every other one. You no longer have to guess at where a given course might be ranked, now you can literally just look it up. You can use the courses you have played and their ratings in the ten categories as a baseline against courses you are interested in playing. Crowdsourced Golf provides the clearest picture of all courses’ relative standing.

ISSUE 3: Most existing rankings methodologies are murky or uninformative

When looking at most golf course rankings, you don’t know why a certain course is rated the way it is. Ranking methodologies are often not discernable. Continuing my critique of Golf Digest, I do not understand their rankings methodology. Look at this course’s values at the bottom of the page here. This is their number one rated public golf option in Illinois, but the displayed values don’t convey that. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to interpret this and why are there so many decimals? This is not helpful to visitors of the site.

Additionally, some rankings ignore aspects of courses altogether. This is particularly true if you are interested in the non-golf-course merits of a facility. For example: how is the food? do they have a driving range? how full is their tee sheet? maybe a course isn’t the greatest, but in conjunction with their pricing, is it good value?

There are also some sites with rankings that are downright useless and don’t provide any substantive comparison of courses. As I said earlier, there already are some websites that do in fact show you every course in your area, such as Golfnow/Golfpass. With G*lfn*w1, you can find a list and a map view of all courses in Chicagoland. They even offer a “Top Rated Golf Courses in Chicago Area” list, but it’s pathetic. Seriously, click this link and tell me if you can glean any value from their rankings.

This lack of substance is not their only problem, their site also aggravates me to no end. Nothing is obvious so you spend way too much clicking around. And I have specific gripes like that fact that visually they show you the star ratings for several different course attributes, but they don’t provide the numerical value next to that star. It’s up to you to estimate how much of this tiny star is filled in. Is that 4.5 stars or 4.7? Sorry, G*lfn*w is not going to tell you. That’s unacceptably bad UX. Additionally, every course winds up converging to the same star rating, right around 4.0 stars. None of this easily teaches you anything about the course you might want to play. It also leaves you guessing as to what the values really represent. 3.7 stars is well over 50% of the available stars, but since it’s less than the average of 4.0 stars you would assume this is a poor course. However, this is only an assumption. It would be better if the website told you explicitly and honestly.

So that’s exactly what I built Crowdsourced Golf to do. Crowdsourced Golf makes comparisons between different courses effortless because I chose to use percentiles instead of raw averages from the reviews. This differentiates the data in an easily discernable manner. For each of the ten criteria that the site tracks, there is a course in the 100th percentile and, sadly, a course in the 0th percentile. The rest of the courses fill in between those values, but the key is that you are no longer only seeing ratings between 4.2 and 4.7 stars like what is shown by Google Reviews or G*lfn*w. Instead, you will see that a given course is in the 12th percentile for Fun For All Skill Levels. Boom, this is an incredibly useful data point when deciding where to play with your beginner friend. Percentiles make everything honest, obvious, and interpretable.

An example of how this math works is as follows. If the lowest raw average Course Conditions value is 5.6 out of 10 (I’ve noticed people don’t like giving out really low scores) and the highest is 8.9 out of 10, then, instead of displaying 5.6 and 8.9, these values are normalized so that 5.6 becomes 0 (since it is the worst average score) and 8.9 becomes 10.0. I also normalize the scores from each reviewer because some people grade easier than others.

This methodology maximizes for utility and transparency, even if the math requires some thought to follow. Everyone can intuitively understand the values that are displayed. Higher is better, lower is worse.

To see the percentile values for every category from a given course, expand that course’s details by clicking on it.

ISSUE 4: No site pairs detailed reviews with quick access to locations/directions

I was shocked at how many sites specialized in showing you the details of a course without a map or a map without any course details, but not both. This meant multiple tabs were always involved to get the location and the details of a course. There were no golf websites providing this combination, though I had seen it done well elsewhere, so I made sure to include this feature. This is the final headache that Crowdsourced Golf eliminates.

With Crowdsourced Golf, after identifying an appealing course, you can find out where that course is located painlessly. I’ve built in a map view and a ranked list view with a modern user experience. If you click on a course’s location or address you automatically receive directions from your current location.

Crowdsourced Golf provides the unique combination of being able to see all of the traits for a course and easily getting directions to that course all in one site.

Solving those four issues is the value prop of Crowdsourced Golf. I hope this overview conveys why this new website is the best possible way to find and evaluate golf courses near you. I urge you to check it out for yourself, and please share it with others who you think may find it useful!

Before I wrap this post up I have one favor to ask: if you have played golf anywhere in Minneapolis/St. Paul, submit reviews for those courses on Crowdsourced Golf. In order to get this project off the ground, course reviews need to get added into the database. Right now, many of the courses have zero reviews because me and my friends have never played them. Submitting a review is quick and easy and can be done from your phone. This will help create value for everyone else who visits the site.

I am excited to finally share this resource with the public golf community as it modernizes the golf course rankings experience. There are many similar resources for other things in our lives2, but yet nothing for golf. Until now.

Crowdsourced Golf is, and will always be, free to use.

Thanks for reading.

Lonny Likes

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