The 16th Annual Lebanon Ice Bowl

Wanted to hop on here and just mention a blatant rule violation that happened in this tournament and the responsibility of this fault falls directly on tournament officials. During the 2nd round, ... show more ›

Wanted to hop on here and just mention a blatant rule violation that happened in this tournament and the responsibility of this fault falls directly on tournament officials.

During the 2nd round, the 3rd place player of MA1 was placed on 2nd card while the 5th place played was moved to lead card (5th place played also happened to be in charge of hole assignments). When questioned about this, reasoning was based on an automatic program determining hole assignments. After doing some research, this turns out to be a complete lie. According to rule 1.06.D of the competition manual, "Within a division, players should be grouped by lowest score. The group with the lowest scores starts on the lowest-numbered hole, and so on." After speaking with other touring professionals and tournament directors, PDGA automatically gives out hole assignments based on score for rounds 2, 3, etc..., this mistake just does not happen base on programming errors.

With this information, it appears the person in charge of hole assignments purposefully and willfully performed this alteration in hole assignments. Now it did not yield an advantage for the 5th place player, but I can't help to think that this negatively impacted the 3rd place player as they were not able to play with the leaders and have that atmosphere dictate their round.

Did this ultimately impact final standings, maybe not, but this does not take away the gravity of this situation. If this was at any other tournament, or even in the MPO/FPO fields, this could have lead to serious financial implications. I hope that this mistake is acknowledged, and actions are put in place to prevent mishandlings like this in the future.