Planning Golf Tournaments – How to Ensure Your Awards Ceremony Goes with a Swing

Whether you’re organising a club, corporate or charity golf tournament, or even a golfing event for a stag or hen weekend, making sure that everything runs smoothly can be stressful.

Ensuring that your awards ceremony is successful doesn’t have to be a chore, however. Just follow our top five tips to make sure yours is well above par.

1. Order Your Trophies and Medals in Time

With so many things to think about, it’s easy to leave things like buying awards until the last minute. Luckily, even if your time-scales are tight, you can now order all of your trophies and medals online, and have them delivered to your door.

If you need your golf awards in a hurry and you’re having them delivered to a UK mainland address, you can buy them in our online store and take advantage of our express delivery service. If you have a couple more days to spare and you’re ordering a number of awards, however, you could save money. We offer a free five day delivery service to UK mainland addresses for orders costing more than £35, for example.

2. Set Yourself an Awards Budget

Whether you’re planning a small office event, a club monthly medal competition, an amateur junior golf championship, or a huge charity tournament, it’s vital to set yourself a budget before you start shopping for awards, particularly when you only have a proportion of competition fees or limited club funds to pay for them with.

Make a list of the awards you need and decide whether or not you want to split the money equally between them, or spend more on trophies for the more prestigious titles. You can then set an individual budget for each prize.

Are you running a charity event or a tournament involving local businesses? If so, offering companies the chance to sponsor your awards can be a great way of reducing your costs or enabling you to buy something glitzier than you’d usually be able to afford.

If you don’t have much spare cash available, however, don’t worry. You can get some stunning trophies and medals for men’s, ladies’ and junior golfing events at affordable prices when you shop online.

3. Personalise Your Golf Awards

It’s also worth considering whether or not you want to personalise the awards that you’re presenting. Adding the date on which the tournament took place, the name of the event and, if it isn’t already specified on it, what the award was presented for, will make any trophy or medal more appealing, and remind the recipient of their day in months and years to come.

Personalising your golf awards won’t take long and it won’t break the bank either. Every golf award and medal we stock can be engraved for a small additional charge, and you can specify the wording you want during the ordering process, so it’s quick and easy to do. Just remember to take the costs into account when setting your budget.

4. Establish a Presentation Order

When planning the ceremony itself, there are lots of things to think about. Who will present the awards? Where will you hold the ceremony? Will you hand out the trophies and medals immediately after the tournament finishes, later that day or at a separate event?

Whenever and wherever you decide to have your ceremony, make sure that you produce a schedule, so you know exactly which trophy or award will be presented next. This will also help you to set up your trophy table in a logical way, so that the person presenting the awards can find each one with ease.

You might decide to present the overall tournament winner with his or her trophy first, and leave surprise awards until the end. However, if you’ve chosen an impressive-looking prize, such as one of our gorgeous claret jugs or sparkling silver presentation cups, you may want to leave this on the table until the end.

You’ll probably have a number of awards to present, including some – or all – of the following:

The Nearest the Pin Award

Presented to the golfer who gets his or her ball closest to the flag on a specific par three hole during the course of the day, this award is a tournament favourite.

The Longest Drive Award

Another classic golfing award, this trophy goes to the player who hits the longest drive onto the fairway at a designated hole.

Hole-in-One Awards

It’s worth having more than hole-in-one trophies or medals to hand at your golf tournament, in case several players have successful days.

Make sure you leave enough time to present all of them properly, so your ceremony doesn’t seem rushed towards the end.

5. Make Your Ceremony Fun

Nobody wants to sit through a dull awards ceremony, no matter how much they want to get their hands on some silverware. Try to think of ways to make the occasion more entertaining, even if it’s just by adding a few jokes into your presentation speeches.

One way of livening things up is to present some of your players with novelty golf awards. This can be a great option for organisers of corporate golfing days, or stag or hen events. It’s important to ensure that this type of award will sit well with the sponsors and any other key stakeholders, however, and that recipients are likely to see the funny side.

We stock some superb novelty options, including Bad Loser, Booby Prize, In the Water, In the Bunker and In the Rough trophies. Take advantage of our engraving service, however, and you can transform any of the items in our well-stocked golfing section into novelty awards.

Have you organised a successful golf tournament awards ceremony? What advice would you give to anyone planning one? Let us know in the comments section.