We entered the Bandon lottery in December 2024. Our name was picked in January 2025, and we had nearly 20 months to plan last week's trip for eight guys, five rounds across three days.
It's still a little unreal it actually happened.
The whole week ran on ForeBoard — the golf scoring app I've built, specifically with this trip in mind. Five rounds, four game formats, mixed pairings, net scoring, an 11-point Ryder Cup. The lone hiccup was determining who would enter scores (more on that to follow).
The setup
After a Sunday night in the town of Bandon, we showed up to the resort Monday morning to almost perfect weather. We'd read about needing layers all week. We spent most of the week ditching them.
The schedule was tight: Monday afternoon at Bandon Trails. Tuesday, Old Macdonald in the morning and Sheep Ranch after lunch. Wednesday, Pacific Dunes in the morning and Sheep Ranch again to close the trip.
Two of our buddies — new dads, both unable to travel — served as team captains from home. The eight of us who made the trip got drafted to either Team John or Team Dillon.
We dropped bags at the Inn, loaded up on merch, found beers, and hit the practice facility. Enthusiasm reached an all-time high getting to the first tee, taking a ceremonial Fireball shot to officially start the trip.
How we drafted the teams
A week before we flew out, we did a live, in-person snake draft. Sunday night, before the first Sunday Night Football game of the season. Everyone brought food. It was a buffet of McDonald's, Taco Bell, Jimmy John's, and some random Chinese food. That was fittingly the least organized part of the entire experience.
Once the teams were set, we used ChatGPT to build the pairings for all five rounds — making sure everyone played with each of their teammates at least once and faced as many different opponents as possible across the trip. Took maybe ten minutes.
The draft is a staple for this trip going forward. It kicked off the competition a full week before the first tee ball, and it gave everyone real skin in the game before they'd even packed. If you're planning a trip like this: do the draft first. Do it live if you can.
We put everyone's names and handicaps on the TV as the GMs picked their rosters. To determine the first pick, John and Dillon did a KP on the sim in the garage.
The five rounds, five games
We knew the golf itself was going to be iconic. What we didn't know was how much a well-designed format would elevate the experience.
Two rules going in: everyone plays their own ball (nobody goes to Bandon to play a scramble), and the point structure escalates round by round to a singles finale — like a real Ryder Cup. Eleven points total across five rounds. First team to six gets free dinner the final night at Ghost Tree Grill.
Format variety mattered too. Four different games across five rounds so nothing repeated back-to-back with the same feel: Best Ball (twice), High/Low, Aggregate Match Play, and singles Match Play to close.
Day 1 · Bandon Trails · 4v4 Best Ball, Stroke Play, net · 1 point
Monday afternoon, we eased in. All eight guys in one matchup — four Team Dillon players and four Team John players, best ball for each team.
The stroke-play piece was deliberate. Every other round was match play, so if the other 10 points ended in a 5-5, we wanted to increase the likelihood this round wouldn't end in a tie so it would be the tiebreaker. Ten other points at stake meant Trails was low pressure, but not throwaway.
The bonus: this was the only round of the trip where we played with our full team, and the round where the caddies were still fresh to us. Between shots, we milked them for everything they knew about the other courses.
This course was one of the group's favorites, partly because we were all so excited to be there. It's such a different course than the others though, and one our caddies said was one of their favorites as well.
Day 2 AM · Old Macdonald · 2v2 Best Ball, Match Play, net · 2 points
Two 2v2 pairings for the first time. Points still shared with a partner — you could still hide behind a good round from your guy — but the pressure was up a notch.
This is the course with the signature ghost tree and it was our earliest round of the trip. We were the third and fourth groups out, so we got the signature chill and marine layer before it burned off later.
There are several blind shots where it's especially helpful to have a caddy.
Match play at 2v2 with best ball is the format sweet spot for a trip like this — competitive without being punishing, and low enough stakes that a bad hole doesn't sink the round.
Day 2 PM · Sheep Ranch · 2v2 High/Low, net · 2 points
High/Low was the format most in the group had not played before. It was also the one that broke the trip open.
Rules: on each hole, two points are up for grabs — one for the low score, one for the high score. In our 2v2 pairings, my team's low score competes with the other team's low (lower wins), and my team's high score competes with the other team's high (lower wins). No blood on pushes. No carryovers.
There's no hiding in this format. Every score matters — the guy shooting an 8 is still fighting for the high point.
Sheep Ranch is the most exposed course, so the wind can be a real factor. We were incredibly lucky and most of us were down to just our polos. We played it at sunset and given the conditions, and iconic ocean views, this was the favorite course for most of us.
This is also where the first real drama hit. One of the pairings led 7-3 after seven holes, dropped the next eight points to fall behind 11-7 after 14, then reeled off the final four points to halve the match at 11-11. Salvaged a full point back from the brink.
By dinner, we had a real Cup on our hands.
Day 3 AM · Pacific Dunes · 2v2 Aggregate Match Play, net · 2 points
Everyone was dragging a bit after 36 holes the day before. Pacific — often ranked the top course at the resort — was waiting on the third day.
Aggregate Match Play was our fourth format: both partners' scores on each hole get added together, low team total wins the hole. Zero forgiveness — if one guy blows up, the hole is basically gone.
The course has a spectacular mix of trees and ocean views, including a few iconic signature holes on the coast. Pro tip — avoid the bunkers on the par 3s at all costs. Learned that lesson the especially painful way.
The two teams split the round. Coming into the singles finale, one team was up 4-3.
Day 3 PM · Sheep Ranch · 4 singles Match Play, net · 4 points
The finale. Four 1v1 matches, four points on the table, and one team already up 4-3 needing just two of the four to lift the Cup.
Matchups were determined by seed — net scores from the first four rounds sorted the field. The two number-one seeds squared off. So did the twos, the threes, the fours. Fair fights, no captain's picks.
The winning team clinched two of the four matchups by hole 15, so the last few holes were left to locking in mental images while the sun set over the Pacific.
Final: 8-3. The backloaded singles design did what it was supposed to do — the whole trip stayed live until the back nine of the final round.
See the full Bandon 2026 leaderboard → Every round, every match, every net standing, still live.
The bookkeeping problem
Are there people who run a tournament like this by hand?
The moving parts are seemingly infinite. A 4v4 team round on Day 1, figuring out who pops on which holes and whose net score counts, doing the math at dinner. Then doing it all again the next day for two 2v2 pairings across two different courses in two different formats. Then aggregate scoring on Day 3. Then four singles matches after that. Meanwhile the individual net leaderboard is running across all five rounds, and every guy wants to know where he stands.
That's an experience that could genuinely take away from the trip.
ForeBoard handled all of it. We simply entered the gross score for each hole and the app ran the pairing, the match, the round, the Cup total, and the individual net. In real time. Everyone could see every match on their phone at any point.
About the phone thing
One of the biggest questions going into the trip was who was actually going to enter scores.
Most of us prefer to golf without our phones. And Bandon is a walking-only resort — the idea of keeping phones on us wasn't exactly appealing.
Our solution: one guy per foursome enters all four scores on a hole. We figured we'd rotate at the turn — halfway through, swap scorekeepers.
That rotation never happened. Once we saw how fast the score entry was, whoever had scored the front just kept going. Four clicks per hole (one per golfer). No scrolling, no double-clicks, no manually advancing to the next hole. Total phone time was maybe 30 seconds per hole — walking off the green, enter the scores, phone back in the pocket. It was comparable or less time than filling out a paper card with a pencil.
James Gonzalez ended up being the primary scorer for his group most of the trip:
"I handled the scoring for my group the entire trip, and ForeBoard made it super easy. As soon as I entered our scores, it calculated who won the hole and updated everything right away. We were playing formats like high-low, which would've been a pain to keep track of on our own, especially trying to figure out what was happening with the group behind us. Being able to see the live updates and know where everyone stood made the Ryder Cup format way more fun and kept us all engaged throughout the rounds. It honestly became a big part of the trip."
— James Gonzalez
Access itself was frictionless. I texted the scoring link into the group chat once, and every guy opened it in his phone browser — score entry, live leaderboards, individual net standings, all the team matches. No app to download. No accounts. Nobody was going to install a new golf app for a three-day trip, and nobody had to.
What the guys said
This group has a range of opinions about scoring apps. Some of the guys have been on ForeBoard for casual weekend rounds; others have been more skeptical, still drawn to the simplicity of a pencil and a paper card. This was the third multi-round trip this crew has done together, and the first one we scored on an app.
By day two, the pencil-and-paper conversation was over.
Jesse put it more polished than any of us would after two beers (and maybe a couple Old Fashioneds):
"ForeBoard was absolutely perfect for our trip to Bandon Dunes. We used it to run a full Ryder Cup–style format, and it made the entire experience feel that much more legit. Keeping track of matches, standings, and the competition throughout the trip was seamless and added a whole new level of excitement for our group. I honestly can't imagine doing another Ryder Cup trip without it."
— Jesse Revesz
We left Bandon already scheming the fourth trip. And I'm confident it'll be on ForeBoard.
A personal note
I started building ForeBoard nine months ago specifically with this Bandon trip in mind. Five rounds, five games, eight guys, 720 individual holes of golf, 3,632 total shots — and it all worked. Walking off the last green, after the Cup was won, was a hard thing to describe.
The part I wasn't ready for: how quickly the guys just used it. Nobody asked how it worked after round one. Nobody needed a walkthrough. It sat in the pocket like any other app, and it did the job I'd been picturing it doing for nine months.
One of the GMs who couldn't attend followed the whole trip on the spectator view — real-time leaderboards from his living room, texting into the group chat with reactions during rounds. That wrinkle wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Team Dillon won the cup and earned a free dinner the last night. Team John started plotting revenge for 2027. On the drive in from Eugene, a couple of the guys ran a two-man karaoke show for the full three hours — the bus was jacked. Three days later, we rolled back to the airport in near reflective silence, scheming when we can do it again.
Running a trip with your buddies? Score it on ForeBoard → Ryder Cup, Nassau, best-ball, skins, high/low — pick the format each round, ForeBoard handles the pairings, the matches, and the running trip totals. Free at any trip size, works in any browser, no accounts. My email is nathan@foreboard.app if you want to talk through how a specific trip might work.
