Two months after golf clubs and club golfers across Australia transitioned to the new Golf Australia CONNECT handicap-management system, Damien de Bohun, Golf Australia’s general manager of clubs, facilities and places to play, provides an update.
Australian Golf Digest: In our October issue, you explained all the upcoming changes and work that had gone into the transition to Golf Australia CONNECT. How has it gone?
Damien de Bohun: It’s been a huge few months, and we’re proud of how the industry has come together to achieve this major milestone. But we recognise that there is a lot more work to be done.
The transition is one of the largest digital projects ever undertaken in Australian sport, connecting 1,960 clubs, more than 450,000 members and more than 280 million historical rounds in a single national platform.
A rollout of this scale is never simple, but it’s been made possible through a whole-of-sport effort – from club administrators and volunteers to our golfer onboarding champions and licensed software providers. We had more than 3,600 club administrators trained and ready before launch, 1,400 volunteers supporting golfers at the local level and a 50-person customer support team operating three daily shifts, seven days a week, resolving more than 10,000 support tickets in the first two weeks of the transition period.
There are always things you’d do differently with the benefit of hindsight, but early feedback from clubs has been encouraging. In our recent national club survey, three in four clubs shared positive feedback on the transition, and less than 7 per cent said they weren’t as prepared as they could be.
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What were the biggest obstacles in making the transition?
There were three major challenges.
The first was the sheer scale and complexity. This wasn’t as simple as switching one system off and another on. It was five major projects in one: replacing the GOLF Link handicap system, launching a new club management and membership platform, replacing the Golf Australia app, recalculating handicaps to align with the World Handicap System changes and unifying seven separate websites into one new digital home at golf.com.au. Each one of those would be a major project on its own, but the interconnection between them meant they had to change over simultaneously.
The second was onboarding and training. Bringing 1,960 clubs and 3,600 administrators into a new system required an enormous education effort, including four weeks of intensive webinars, training sessions and direct support. That was especially true for smaller, often regional clubs that don’t use third-party software, which often rely on volunteers and that stand to receive the most value from the new Golf Australia CONNECT platform.
The third was golfer onboarding. We have close to half a million golfers who are members of clubs that need to verify their details to create a new Golf ID, a necessary change from a privacy and security perspective. The volume of verification e-mails caused some delays early on, especially when we discovered a technical issue sending some e-mails to spam folders. Once resolved, the process stabilised, and we’ve now seen more than 250,000 successful activations so far.
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Why were some handicaps so distorted initially?
Integrity of the handicapping system has always been a top priority, and this upgrade was driven largely by the need to modernise the technology that underpins it. The changeover involved recalculating every golfer’s handicap under the updated World Handicap System guidelines.
During that process, we identified a course-data issue that affected how some Scratch and Slope Ratings were applied. In those cases, courses were temporarily assigned default values of 72 (Scratch) and 113 (Slope), which led to inaccurate calculations for some golfers.
While the average expected handicap movement was less than 0.5 strokes, we saw an actual variation closer to 0.9, with about 60 percent of golfers unaffected, 80 percent within one stroke, and about 20 percent experiencing a larger change. Many of those discrepancies were resolved through a full recalculation and validation within the 12-day transition period.
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The social-media feedback has been colourful, especially about the new app. What didn’t people understand?
Change on this scale is always going to create frustration for some users, especially early on. It’s worth remembering this is version one of the new app, a foundation that will continue to evolve. We’ve been encouraging feedback from golfers about the app and that’s helping us prioritise future updates and enhancements.
Before launch, we conducted on-course testing with club golfers at a range of public and private facilities. The feedback from those sessions was positive and directly influenced the design and functionality of the product for launch.
The app itself is built on proven technology already used by hundreds of thousands of golfers in countries such as New Zealand and the UK. While the interface and layout are different to what Australian golfers were used to, it provides a more modern, secure and connected experience.
