At Songi Sculpture Park's park golf course in Yangyang County, Gangwon Province, referees held tablets instead of paper on the 31st of last month, when the 6th Martin Carrot Cup Yangyang Park Golf Tournament was held. As players struck their balls across the course, referees entered their stroke counts and results were tallied in real time.
Digital transformation has arrived in park golf tournament operations. Until now, tournaments typically collected handwritten scorecards after play and had staff re-enter the figures into a computer system. Martin Carrot, a park golf equipment maker, built its own tournament management system to cut out that cumbersome process and used it for the first time at this event.
The company developed three programs covering refereeing and score tallying, group assignments along with name tags and scorecard production, and player registration, then linked them into a single system. In the referee program, stroke counts entered on a tablet for each player are tallied in real time.
"I saw four or five people staying up all night on work that one employee could now handle alone using artificial intelligence, and I felt change was needed," said Lim Seung-chul, chief executive of Martin Carrot. "Some associations hesitate to host tournaments because of the operational burden, so I wanted digitalization to help broaden the base of park golf as well."
Some at the venue found the new method unfamiliar, though others called it convenient. "At first it felt unfamiliar because I was used to paper records, but once I tried it myself, it was convenient to be able to enter and check scores right away," one referee said. Players cited faster access to results from other groups as an advantage.
As the first rollout of its own system, the company still faces improvements. Martin Carrot plans to keep using the system at future tournaments and to incorporate the inconveniences and improvement points identified during actual operations. It said it will refine functions based on the operating experience and on-site feedback accumulated at each tournament.
A total of 360 men and women competed in the tournament. Play was held as individual men's and women's competition in groups of four, using an 18-hole stroke format in a shotgun start. Kim Byung-soo of Sejong, with 51 strokes, and Lee Ok-jo of Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, with 56 strokes, took first place in the men's and women's divisions. Total prize money came to 35 million won, with the winners each receiving 3 million won in cash and a Martin Carrot club set worth 1.3 million won.
