BackNineLive League scoring
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The person behind the product

Jimenez Julien, founder of BackNineLive

I write the software, answer the support email and sit in on league nights. If a course handicap comes out wrong on a Thursday in July, it is my problem before it is yours.

Portrait of Jimenez Julien

Why I built a league scoring tool

BackNineLive started with a shoebox. A friend of my family ran the Thursday men's league at a nine hole public course for eleven seasons, and every September he emptied a shoebox of scorecards onto a kitchen table to settle the season points and the skins money. Cards were damp, half the scores were crossed out, and three or four of them had two players signed on the same line. He was not bad at the job. The job was simply built out of paper, and paper does not add up on its own.

I sat with him for two Fridays. What struck me was not the volume of arithmetic, it was the shape of it. A league secretary is doing the same six operations every week, in the same order, on the same roster, with a rule set the league voted on in April. That is exactly the sort of work software should carry. So I spent a season learning the rules properly: the difference between a Handicap Index and a course handicap, why slope belongs in the conversion, what net double bogey does to a triple on a par 3, how a blind draw is meant to work when a foursome shows up as a threesome, and why a league treasurer cares far more about the skins carryover than about a pretty chart.

The first version of BackNineLive did one thing: it took a nine hole card on a phone and produced a net score that matched what the secretary would have written by hand. That was the whole test. If a league officer looked at our number and their number and had to ask which one was right, the product had failed. Everything else, the flight boards, the pot settlement, the results email, the season archive, grew out of that first agreement.

Experience and expertise

I have spent the last decade building small operational software for trades that run on schedules and paperwork: shops, clinics, sites and clubs. Golf leagues turned out to be the most rule bound of them all, and the most forgiving of anyone who takes the rules seriously. Since BackNineLive started carrying live seasons I have watched league nights in person at public courses in Iowa, Arizona, Ohio and Maine, and run monthly calls with league officers who tell me exactly what broke last Thursday.

  • Handicap arithmetic under the World Handicap System, including course handicap conversion by tee set, playing handicap allowances by format and the net double bogey cap.
  • League formats that actually get played in the United States: net stroke play, quota points, modified Stableford, two person scramble, best ball and match play ladders.
  • Municipal operations: tee sheets, twilight rates, rain outs, week credits, dues collection and the reality that a pro shop counter has about forty seconds to spare per player.
  • Data portability, because a volunteer secretary should never be locked out of the season they built.

How this product is built and maintained

Every rule that touches a score is written as a test before it is written as a feature, and the handicap engine is checked against worked examples supplied by league handicap chairs. When a league disputes a number, I ask for the card, reproduce the case in the test suite, and either fix the code or explain the rule in writing. Both outcomes get published to the leagues on that format.

Releases go out on Sunday and Monday, never on a league night. Between four and ten in the evening local time, from April to October, the product is treated as frozen and monitored. Support email is answered by me, usually inside one business day, and there is no ticket queue between an officer and the person who wrote the code. Editorially, every claim on this site is one I can show you the data for: the 412 leagues, the 318,000 rounds and the seven minute median are drawn from the 2025 season, not from a marketing meeting. If a number stops being true, it gets changed here.

What I am accountable for is narrow and specific: correct handicap math, standings that publish the same night, an export you can take with you, and a straight answer about whether this product suits your league. If your league has thirty players, one flight and no pot, I will tell you that a spreadsheet is fine and that you do not need me.

Published articles

These nine pieces make up League Night, the magazine I write for league organizers and municipal pro shops, and each one is drawn from a question a league officer actually asked me.

Contact the author

Questions about handicap edge cases, format support, data export or an odd card from last week come straight to me. Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and include the league, the tees played and the hole in question, and I will work the card by hand and send back the arithmetic. If you would rather talk it through, ask for a call in the message and mention your time zone.

BackNineLive is published by MLJ, SASU. The full publisher details are on the legal notice, and what happens to anything you send is set out in the privacy policy. To see the product working on a league like yours, use the demo request form on the home page.

Page written by Jimenez Julien, founder of BackNineLive and publication director at MLJ, SASU. Reach him at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.