Fashioning fair foursomes for the fairway (using a spreadsheet-based DSS as the driver)

Golf teams at most public universities derive much of their support for player scholarships from external donors. Relationships with current and potential donors are often created and maintained via annual golf tournaments that pair donors with varsity players and team coaches in a scramble format tournament. This paper introduces a new spreadsheet-based DSS tool for optimizing the formation of teams for multi-round, unique-team, golf scramble tournaments. The DSS uses mixed-integer programming to create unique teams for each round of play while considering the handicaps of all teams and individual players to ensure a reasonable level of fairness in the tournament.