American Junior Golf Association
May 28, 2003
Volume 2
Issue 3

In This Issue

From Green to Screen
A hands-off look at AJGA Live Scoring

View From Chateau:
Paula Creamer's appearance on the LPGA Tour gave her a glimpse of her dream

The Gallery:
There is always fun to be had on and off the golf course at AJGA events.

The Scoring Tent:
Here are the newly crowned champions from Easter Weekend and the Thunderbird International Junior


News From the Fringe:

Survey Says...
With the help of HP iPAQ Pocket PCs, the AJGA Equipment Survey makes its way into the 21st century.

Easter Weekend Roundup
Countless playing opportunities were available over the Easter holiday as the AJGA conducted events in three regions of the country. Here are the results from the whirlwind weekend.

Harman, Knoll Get Summer Started on High Note
The Thunderbird International Junior annually marks the beginning of the AJGA Summer Season

By the Book
How well do you know the rules of golf? Not as well as Gus Montano, the AJGA director of education. He'll test you here.

THE AJGA LINK HOME

Subscribe!
Enter your email to join The AJGA Link today!

 
HTML Text AOL


From Green to Screen

A hands-off look at AJGA Live Scoring

Story by Rob Coleman


 
You know the feeling. You can’t take your eyes off your computer screen. Your favorite player is hot in contention and through the miracle of “live scoring,” you are able to track the hole-by-hole scores as soon as they occur.

And so you sit, hitting refresh, over and over again, just knowing that one more birdie will push your player into the top five, or, better yet, into first place.

The occasion may be the Masters, U.S. Open, or any PGA or LPGA Tour event. Or, maybe it’s one of the AJGA’s Invitational tournaments. In any case, for better or for worse, you are glued to your computer.

Perhaps now, as you read this, you are following a tournament’s Live Scoring in another browser window. Go ahead, take a minute to refresh. (This article will still be here when you come back... Just don’t forget to come back.)

As you follow the live golf action, you probably don’t stop to wonder how each player’s score can make it to your computer so quickly after it is posted. Who could blame you? Few people stop and think about the technology we take for granted.

Lucky for you, this article will answer your unasked questions about how Live Scoring really works. For the technologically impaired, this is not the signal to click away and check out the Photo Gallery. Stick around for the rest of this article and you will be amply rewarded with knowledge and enlightenment that the Photo Gallery can never give you.

We begin our story in tournament headquarters the day before the round even starts. When the tournament pairings are ready (how the AJGA prepares tournament pairings deserves an article unto itself), the pairings are exported to a database.

The Cingular Wireless RIM BlackBerry device is a key component to AJGA Live Scoring. It sends the on-course scores to the AJGA database.
The database is read by Cingular Wireless RIM BlackBerry devices, which are the handy little handheld devices handled on the golf course by volunteers, who enter scores by hand. (And that makes four times the word hand was used in the last sentence in one form or another. Hands up if you noticed that.)
Back to the subject at hand, as each player comes through a scoring checkpoint, which is typically located at six points around the golf course, the Live Scoring volunteer writes the scores of each player in the group for each hole since the last checkpoint.

The players quickly move to the next hole (can’t blame Live Scoring for slow play), the volunteer enters the scores into the Cingular RIM BlackBerry device for each player and uploads the scores to the database.

The Cingular RIM device is the key to quick score entry. The RIM is especially suited for transmitting data across the airwaves.

And so the database is updated with the latest scores. What next?

AJGA Manager of Information Services Tung Lee takes it from there.

Lee has designed the database to calculate the new total score, as well as how many holes have been completed and how many strokes above or under par each player is. The database then re-ranks the players according to their score as related to par. In reality, the computer figures out hundreds of these scores in the time it takes you to say, “Jeepers creepers!”

Now, all the information is there, but you still can’t see it...or can you?

Once the database is updated and the calculations are complete, you can refresh your screen and notice that your favorite junior has climbed a few spots, or dropped a few as the case may be.

How does your computer know this? The computer you are looking at is pulling the latest information straight from this database, and as the scores are updated, so is your screen when you refresh it.

That sounds easy, and it is — as far as you’re concerned. But don’t tell Tung Lee that. He has spent way too many late nights straining over programming codes and fighting his way through database errors to believe such a thing.

For everyone’s sake, this article has avoided the “tech talk.” Your thanks are much appreciated. And now that you’ve made it to the end, give yourself a hand and go check out our Photo Gallery. You deserve it.