Running a golf tournament — whether it's a club championship, a charity event, or a regional qualifier — involves coordinating dozens of spatial decisions that most organizers manage with hand-written notes and radio calls. Who covers which hole? Where do the gallery ropes go? What are today's pin positions? Where does the hospitality tent sit?
GIS maps don't just answer these questions — they communicate the answers visually to everyone involved, from the starter to the scoring team to the marshal captain.
What Tournament Mapping Looks Like in Practice
A tournament course setup map in Atlas is a live, shareable map that sits on top of the course base map and adds tournament-specific layers. On the day before a tournament, the course setup team uses it to:
- Confirm pin positions are placed as planned
- Verify yardage from tee markers to pins
- Show marshal and volunteer assignments by hole
- Mark gallery viewing areas and rope lines
- Note location of first aid, hospitality, and scoring tents
On tournament day, officials and marshals can pull up the map on their phones and see exactly where they should be and what's happening on nearby holes — without radio contact.
Layer 1: Accurate Yardage Reference Map
Every tournament starts with a yardage map. This is different from the hole routing lines on your base course map — a tournament yardage map includes:
- Measured distances from each set of tees to specific landing zone targets, layup points, and the center of each green
- Carry distances to hazards (front of bunkers, edges of water hazards) from each tee
- Hole total yardage from each tee color
To build this in Atlas:
- Open your course base map
- Use the line measurement tool to measure distances between specific points — Atlas displays measurements in yards or meters as you draw
- Add each measured distance as an annotation label at the relevant point
- For official tournament use, cross-reference your measurements against GPS-verified distances from your course's GPS system
If your course has GPS yardage devices, those verified measurements should feed directly into the tournament map rather than being re-measured manually.
Layer 2: Pin Position Sheets
Traditional pin position sheets are printed paper with a diagram showing where the pin is placed on each green, typically described as front/back and left/right with a step count from the edge.
A GIS pin position map replaces this with an accurate spatial representation. For each green:
- Open the green polygon in Atlas
- Drop a point feature at the approximate pin location within the green polygon
- Add attributes: date, hole number, position description (e.g., "front-right, 7 paces from front edge"), difficulty rating
On tournament day, the setup team can open the shared map on their phones, see exactly where each pin is intended to go, and mark it as "placed" once they've done it. The tournament director can monitor setup progress across all 18 holes from the clubhouse.
Layer 3: Tee Marker Setup
Identify which tee complex is being used for each hole and where the tee markers will be placed within that complex. In Atlas, drop a point feature at the front edge of each day's tee location and annotate with:
- Hole number
- Round number
- Yardage from that specific tee placement to the pin
- Turf orientation (parallel or angled to the fairway)
This gives the setup team precise locations and gives the scoring team accurate yardages for their systems.
Layer 4: Marshal and Volunteer Assignments
One of the highest-value uses of tournament mapping is coordinating volunteers. In Atlas:
- Draw polygon zones for each marshal position on the course (typically one or two per hole, plus additional at critical areas like crossing points and hospitality zones)
- Add attributes to each zone: assigned marshal name, radio channel, and reporting contact
- Share a view-only link with the marshal captain
On the day, marshals can see their zone highlighted on the map, understand where adjacent zones begin and end, and navigate to their position using the satellite imagery as a visual guide — particularly useful on large courses where volunteers may be unfamiliar with the layout.
Layer 5: Gallery Areas and Rope Lines
For amateur and professional events, gallery management is a spatial problem. In Atlas, draw:
- Gallery viewing corridors as polygons along prime spectator fairways
- Rope lines as polylines delineating the boundary between spectator and playing areas
- No-entry zones around greens, tees, and hazards
- Crossing points where spectators can move between holes
Style these layers visually: gallery areas in light blue, no-entry zones in red, crossing points as labeled arrows.
Share the map with the head of security or volunteer coordination before the event so everyone understands the intended spectator layout before arriving.
Layer 6: Event Infrastructure
Additional tournament infrastructure needs spatial coordination:
- Scoring tents — point features with tent size, power needs, and assigned staff
- First aid locations — clearly visible points, shared with all officials
- Hospitality tents — linked to access routes and parking
- Broadcast positions — camera platforms, commentary positions
- Practice area setup — range markers, ball drop zones, instructor positions
All of this sits on separate layers that can be shared with the relevant responsible parties without exposing the full tournament setup to everyone.
Sharing the Tournament Map
Atlas allows you to share different views of the same underlying map with different audiences:
- Setup crew: edit access to mark features as placed/confirmed
- Officials and referees: view-only access to the full tournament map
- Marshals and volunteers: view-only access to their zones plus first aid and emergency locations
- Tournament sponsor or host: view-only map showing overall course setup
- Media: a simplified yardage and layout map for broadcast reference
Generating a custom URL for each audience takes minutes and eliminates the problem of giving someone too much access or not enough.
After the Tournament: Building a Rotation Archive
One underutilized application of tournament mapping is building a pin position rotation archive. After each round, duplicate the pin position layer and save it to a dated archive. Over a season, you build a complete spatial record of where pins have been placed — invaluable for course setup committees who want to ensure fair and varied hole locations over a full season.
Combined with scoring data, you can also analyze which pin positions generated the most birdies or difficulty — a genuinely useful dataset for future tournament planning.
Tournament mapping in Atlas turns a chaotic, radio-dependent coordination challenge into a calm, spatially-organized operation that everyone on the team can see and understand.
