The Clubhouse Big Screen

One tap to the big screen

Any event or scorecard has a TV button. It turns the standings into a broadcast-style board built to be read across a room — the clubhouse television, a laptop on the bar, a tablet on a stand.

Any scorecard gets one too, not just a tournament. A single Saturday fourball has its own big screen from the same TV button, with the same settings and the same look — it just has less to show: the leaderboard, the teams where there are any, and the card itself.

Anyone with the link can turn it on. It is a way of looking at the event, not an organiser power, so the barman can put it up without asking you.

The button is on wide screens only — a laptop, a desktop, a TV's own browser, or a tablet turned landscape. There is no TV button on a phone, which is the one screen a room cannot read anyway.

What it shows

An event has more than one thing worth showing, so the board is a carousel that changes subject on its own. Which frames exist depends on the event:

• Overall — the standings as they stand.
• Teams — the sides, where the event has them.
• Live round — today only, which is what most of the room actually wants to know.
• Cards out — every group on the course, one row each, with the people on it and how far round they are. A leaderboard scatters a fourball across four positions; this is the frame that answers “where is my group”. A group that has signed for stays on the list, marked in. It appears once there is more than one group out — with a single card, the live round and the scorecard already say it.
• Scorecards — the card itself, hole by hole, exactly as the group is marking it: every score, the par above it, and the same birdie and bogey marks your own card uses. One group at a time, and it turns to the next on its own. This is the one people stand and watch — you can see a hole land rather than watch a total move.
• Movers — who has climbed and fallen.
• Final placing — on a finished event with stages. A finished event settles here and stops rotating: there is no news left, and a board flipping between frozen tables is just movement.

Along the bottom, a ticker replays the last few scores as they land, each one named — an event has several cards in play, and “Eagle on 12” on its own leaves the room guessing whose.

It celebrates the good ones

A birdie, an eagle, an albatross or a hole-in-one gets a full-screen celebration as it arrives. Which is the point of putting a leaderboard in a room full of people: something happens out on the course and the bar finds out about it.

A score has to hold steady for about twelve seconds before the board announces it. That is deliberate: scores arrive every few seconds, and someone typing “10” passes through “1” on the way. Without the wait, every double bogey entered slowly would be announced to the clubhouse as an ace.

Nothing ever scrolls

A leaderboard on a wall cannot be scrolled — nobody is holding it. So the rows are sized to fill whatever screen they land on, and a field too long for one screenful turns pages rather than shrinking into illegibility.

A frame also holds until it has shown every page of its field once, so a fifty-player table gets all four of its page turns before the board changes subject.

Setting up a real screen

The settings panel exists because a television in a clubhouse is not the laptop this was designed on. Each control solves one specific problem:

Rotating views and turning pages are separate switches, so you can park the board on the overall standings and still let a long field show its second half.

Settings are remembered per screen, not per person. The clubhouse TV keeps its long dwell and its safe area; the laptop you check on keeps neither.

Walking up to it

Tap a chip to jump to a frame — or press its number on a keyboard, if the screen has one attached. The board holds your choice for a couple of minutes and then goes back to rotating on its own.

The board is usually unattended, so a glance never freezes it for the afternoon. To park it deliberately, turn rotation off in settings — that choice sticks.

Getting it onto the television

• Any browser will do. A smart TV's own browser, a laptop on HDMI, a tablet in landscape on a stand. Open the link, press TV, then go fullscreen — or just press F.
• Give it mains power and turn off the device's sleep. A four-hour round outlasts most batteries and every screen timeout.
• Check the edges first. If anything is cropped, raise the safe area until it is not — that is overscan, and it is the TV, not the board.
• Set it up before the first group finishes. The screen is most interesting while scores are landing.

Open a demo event and press TV →