A Sport Outgrowing Spreadsheets: The Story Behind the FootGolf SA Platform

A young sport with grown-up obligations

Footgolf is golf with a football. You kick from the tee to the hole on a real golf course, and the fewest kicks wins. Easy to explain. Hard to play well.

FootGolf South Africa was set up in 2020 as a non-profit to run the sport nationally, and in 2022 it joined the Federation for International FootGolf (FIFG), the world body. In 2024 it adopted a full constitution: a National Executive Committee, provincial committees, affiliated regional clubs, elections, a disciplinary process and a fee-collection policy.

On paper, that’s a modern federation. Day to day, FGSA still ran the way most volunteer sports run.

Life on spreadsheets

Member registers were spreadsheets. Fees arrived as bank transfers, and someone had to work out who each one came from. Club affiliations, event sanctioning and governance records were kept by hand. Announcements went out on whatever channel people happened to check.

For a small sport that’s normal, and it holds up for a while. The constitution changed the maths. It asked the federation to:

• collect every player’s fees centrally and pass each club its share
• prove who is paid up, because only paid members can vote, compete and earn ranking points
• run elections, keep AGM registers, vet club officials and record every decision
• protect members’ personal information under POPIA, South Africa’s data-protection law

Then there’s the sport itself. FIFG publishes official points tables and tie-break rules, and a national ranking is only as good as the scorecards feeding it. Every time someone retyped a paper card, a four had a chance to become a five.

So FGSA needed a system of record: every member, club, payment, scorecard and committee decision entered once, entered correctly, and still checkable a year later.

Writing the constitution into software

That was the brief when I came on as FGSA’s development partner. I didn’t start from a feature list. I started from the federation’s own paperwork: the constitution, the communication policy, the participant development guide and the FIFG rulebook.

A lot of it mapped straight across. No current membership means no tournament entry and no ranking points. A club official has to pass a governance exam on the constitution before getting admin access. The advisory council gets a login that can see everything and change nothing.

Other rules only showed their gaps when real people ran into them. About a month after launch, the federation tried to give a 45-year-old player his starting points in Senior Men, and the system said no. The rules had Senior starting at 46, and nobody had noticed that a 45-year-old didn’t fit any band. The federation confirmed Senior starts at 45. Now every age lands in exactly one category.

Each ruling like that went into a plain-language decisions log that sits alongside the code. It’s past thirty entries. If you want to know why the system behaves the way it does, that’s where to look.

Going live, one piece at a time

Launch day was 10 August 2026, at system.footgolfsa.co.za. People still had to trust it, and the federation needed that trust in a particular order.

Money first. On 30 August a real membership payment went through PayFast and the whole chain held: payment confirmed, membership switched on, receipt emailed. Getting there meant hunting down failures that never showed an error. One example: PayFast had started sending payment confirmations from new servers, and the system was quietly turning them away.

Tournament day next. Players enter and pay online, then get a QR code for check-in. On the course they score hole by hole on their phones. Golf courses and cell signal don’t get along, so scores save on the phone and sync once there’s coverage. Each card then goes through four checks: someone in the group scores it, each player confirms their own card, an official settles disputes, and the tournament director verifies. One unverified card blocks the results.

Then rankings. Ties follow FIFG rules: a play-off for first in each category, countback for second and third. Publish the results and the National Performance Ranking and every club ranking update within seconds. A club’s score is the sum of its members’ points. The federation was firm on that one: points come from results, and nothing else.

The Elite Tour

The first big event on the platform was the Elite Tour, on 26 September 2026.

Two rule changes landed in the days around it. Entry was limited to paid members. Ranking points also became per category, so every division winner gets full first-place points. Both were live before the first tee-off.

The President’s announcement for the event went to 35 members, in the app and by email, and all 35 got it. That’s a small list. It was also the first time anyone at the federation could check that everyone had been told, instead of assuming it.

What comes next

None of this is unique to South Africa, or to footgolf. Plenty of young sports have a constitution, an international rulebook and a growing membership, held together by spreadsheets and goodwill.

That’s why the platform can host more than one federation, each with its own branding, settings and fully separate data. The groundwork is already live.

For FGSA, the difference is having one place to look. Who’s paid? Who’s eligible? How was that ranking worked out? What did the committee decide? Each question has an answer now, with a record behind it.

If your sport, league or club is still running on spreadsheets, I’d like to hear about it.