UNDERSTANDING THE GOLF LOTTERY
Rumors abound throughout the year about the golf lottery, but when the winter season arrives, the
number of golfers multiplies, and tee times are at a premium. This is our attempt to dispel those
rumors! To improve understanding, within the golfing community, we thought a primer on how the
lottery works would make perfect sense.
First, only RCSCW members are eligible to submit lottery requests. Lottery requests, for 18-hole
play only, may be submitted by paper up to two weeks in advance at Golf Operations located at
Pebblebrook Golf Course or online (preferred method). The lottery is not drawn until seven days
prior to requested time – for example, Monday tee times are selected by the lottery on the previous
Monday. Lottery requests must be submitted by 1:00 p.m. 7 days in advance. Lottery slips are
entered into the lottery system to be run along with the lottery requests that have been entered
online. It may be well into the evening before the lottery results are available. If member numbers
are provided in the lottery request, the member(s) that have an e-mail address on file, will
receive an e-mail confirmation after the lottery is drawn and a tee time is awarded. The booked
time will also appear in a member’s “My Itinerary” found in the member web portal.
Golfers from outside of the community may book tee times 4 days in advance by calling any one of
the RCSCW golf courses or on the SCW Web Portal (suncitywest.totaleintegrated.com)
A common misconception about the lottery is that selections are being made by a person. The lottery
is a software program designed by computer professionals who are experts in golf lottery
management. The only human element of the lottery is the manual entry of the paper slips.
Once all the requests are entered (this is being done for tee times that will occur 7 days later),
the lottery program takes over and churns through all the information. When there are multiple
requests for the same time frame and course, the program randomly selects one of the requests and
pushes the rest of the requests to another time frame. The process is repeated until – hopefully –
slots are found for all requests. During peak season and your parameter selections, you may be
“bumped”. Just to be clear, being “bumped” does not mean that your spot is being usurped by someone
who takes precedence over you. It simply means that there were too many lottery requests with
similar parameters to fit on the tee sheet(s), and others were randomly selected before yours. When
that happens, our tee time staff will contact you to let you know you did not get a tee time within
your parameters and will give you other course/time options.
One final note: It doesn’t matter whether:
• You submit your request on a paper slip or online
• You submit your request 1 or 14 days out
• You submit a request for single or multiple tee times
All have equal weight when the lottery program is at work.
Features:
Singles can request a tee time in the lottery.
Email Confirmations, when email address is provided, will be available when the tee time is
awarded.
Small groups up to 10 tee times (40 players) can be submitted.
Lottery Requests can be made 14 days in advance.
All seven courses may be included in a request.
Closed courses will not appear in the course selection list when submitting
online.
Search criteria will include “desired” time, as well as “earliest” and “latest” times.
Lottery requests made online can be edited/deleted by the specified players. Members must be
entered using their member number. Otherwise, they will not receive an email confirmation of their
tee time nor will it appear in their booked
rounds.
Captain information (member number) can be changed to allow non-playing
monitors to enter tee time request.
Revised September 9, 2020