If there is anything golfers hate more than spike marks on the green? It might be Spikemarks on the internet.

If you were looking for college golf scores on the internet, they aren’t there, at least not like they have been in the past.

In July the NCAA and the Golf Coaches Association of America decided to take their online scoring business to a new company founded by ex UCLA golf coach Derek Freeman.

After around 30 years of an association with GolfStat the sanctioning groups decided to make the change to a brand new company which was just being formed.

The proponents for the change argued there were problems with GolfStat’s rankings and they wanted a better system. Opponents of the change wondered if the new company could do the job among other concerns about how the decision to move on from GolfStat was made.

Spikemarks did not make it to the “first tee” on time. College golf has started and fans looking for scores did not find them at the Spikemarks website.

Instead they saw a note saying the site was “ground under repair.” A cute way of saying they either were not ready or their stuff wasn’t working.

It may only be a temporary glitch, but Spikemarks picked a bad day to have a bad day.

College golf may never have been more popular than it is now. Coming on the heels of a Walker Cup win and the promise of a new season fans were ready to see some scores.

When live scoring, the kind of hole by hole information that became available from GolfStat, got online it changed the college game and is considered by many the missing ingredient the college game needed to grow.

The founder of GolfStat was Mark Laesch who began the business in 1984.

A little history about Laesch and GolfStat is important. The service began at first to help golf coaches gather statistics on their players. It was considered a teaching tool to help coaches and players better understand their games.

Over the years, as technology developed Laesch was able to add another element to his college golf statistics. Golfstat added what we all now take for granted, live scoring.

Any golf tournament that is a real tournament now has an army of volunteers stationed around the course gathering scores, passing them along to a computer room were they are posted and sent to the national website and then downloaded on to phones and computers around the world, but most important at the event the scores came from.

Clemson’s retired golf coach Larry Penley was quoted in a 2017 Golf Digest article on how important Laesch’s work was to college golf.

“Before Mark, your guess was as good as anyone’s about where you really stood in a tournament,” Penley told Golf Digest. “You were lucky if you knew if you were even in the hunt let alone winning. He changed all that. It might not seem like that big a deal, but it really changed the entire way you followed college golf.” Penley was quoted in the story.

You can’t downplay the importance of cell phones in the equation, but without Laesch’s service they just would have been a gadget for you to get a selfie with a Tiger or Phil, and not part of the game.

Most great college golfers could play their entire career without much notoriety because tracking scores and tournaments results was nearly impossible.

With live scoring came more interest in the product, more media exposure, more sponsorship and more money. The more money part may have been a big reason for the change from GolfStat to Spikemarks.

It sure doesn’t seem it was done on performance based on the first weeks disasters.

An important part of the GolfStat story is tragic. Laesch and his family were nearly all afflicted with ALS.

The incurable “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” took almost every member of Laesch’s family and took him in 2015.

His son Brian continued the business, but he too was taken by the disease in 2021, but GolfStat continued using the solid foundation built by Brian and his family.

“We are pleased to announce Spikemarks as manager for NCAA golf scoring and ranking services,” was announced by Joni Comstock, the NCAA Senior Vice President of Championships.

In July the decision was made to leave GolfStat to go with Spikemarks.

At the time of this post there has been no official reaction from the NCAA to Spikemarks inability to get scores “up and down” on their website service.

To borrow another expression from golf, the lack of reaction is “par for the course” when it comes to controversy and the NCAA.

The coaches’ association didn’t have anything on their website either.

After they lost the business Laesch built from scratch to Spikemarks, Golfstat issued statements saying they would still be around if anybody needed their services. Good thing they didn’t get mad and take their golf ball and go home.

Over the last few days, little by little some golf tournaments are returning to the GolfStat platform.

Spikemarks claims they were, yet another golf term “hacked” around September 1st and have been working to restore their service.

The “hacking ” claim has been met with skepticism by those who understand what it takes to put together a service like GolfStat was and is.

Freeman had an explanation that sounded like a guy in an alternate shot tournament whose partner had just left him an unplayable lie.

“As with any new platform and application that deals with user input, once used in the “real world” weakness were quickly exposed.”

And then the usual , we are working around the clock stuff.

This brings us to the main point, right now we are back in the dark ages when it comes to checking on scores from events our local teams are playing.

Sports Information Directors at colleges are scrambling to find another way to get the scores and get them out to their fans.

Clemson women are at the Cougar Classic at Yeamans Hall, the men are in Tennessee at the Tennessee Collegiate.

Other area teams will be on the course in the next few days. We hope one or the other scoring service works.

The Furman men’s team begins play in the Gopher Invitational in Minnesota and you will be able to follow them because the tournament will use GolfStat for its scoring.

By next week there could be a lot more.

It may be hard to believe you can get addicted to staring at a computer screen waiting for a 3 or 4 to pop in on a scorecard, but that is what college fans have gotten used to and at least for now it is missing.

Don’t you just hate spike marks.