Transcripts - Episode 1: Welcome to the Birdie Board Podcast

The Birdie Board Podcast is brought to you by the Birdie Board app — the easiest way to track matches, scores, and handicaps with friends.

Now, here's your host, Corey, with another episode of the Birdie Board Podcast.

Welcome to the first-ever Birdie Board Podcast. My name is Corey. I'm going to be the host for this podcast, and I'm going to just talk about what to expect in the show today.

This show is going to be split into two parts. The first part is just to talk about this podcast. This is the first one ever, so I thought it would be probably smart for me to share what this podcast is going to be about, but also — what is Birdie Board? It's a pretty important part to the whole podcast, so I'll get into that a little bit later as well.

But I'm glad you're here. I'm not sure how many listeners I'm actually going to have in this first episode. So if you're listening, you're going to be among the very first, and you're going to be able to say you've been with me since the beginning.

So what is the purpose of this podcast? I think it starts with just the love of golf.

I remember when I was younger, one of the first things I liked about golf was the cross-generational aspect of it. I remember when I was younger, I was able to play with my dad and my pop-up. I just thought that was so cool — that there's a sport out there that can bring people together that are cross-generational. There's just not many things like that.

My pop-up wasn’t going to go out onto a football field, and my dad barely could do that too lately. But we were all out on the golf course together.

And it's a nice memory for me. My pop-up has since passed, so when I play the game of golf, I remember him a lot, and it's cool to have those memories. Even last weekend, I built some memories with my family and my best friend Joe. We played 18 holes, and my dad was there, and my father-in-law, and we all just played golf.

It was really cool. It's just a way to connect, and I think a lot of people miss that about the sport.

Another cool thing I like about golf is, I think it's a way that guys — and I know this is true for girls too — but definitely guys — get together and do stuff together.

I am a firm believer that relationships are built by doing things together, especially for men. I think doing golf is one of those things. It's not many men that will just go sit down and have a cup of coffee with each other — while I do think that's a good thing for guys to try to do — I think golf is that avenue for a lot of guys to build those relationships.

That's a big motivation for why I'm even starting this podcast.

Why now too? Exciting thing is — Birdie Board, the app, just got into the App Store. So it kind of corresponds with kicking that off and just kind of builds some excitement around that app. And it's just to expand the goal of that app.

Just kind of a hint — the app is built to be able to do golf with friends and family in new and unique ways, and let Birdie Board do all the scoring while you just relax and play golf. Like I said, I'll explain more about Birdie Board later, but it's definitely a big motivation behind why I'm starting this podcast in the first place.

So I kind of imagine casual people listening to this, and even people who are really good at golf. But I'll be honest, I am a 20-ish handicap. I've had really good days and I've had really bad days.

And I think that's what's unique about this podcast — I'm not coming to you as like a five handicap or four handicap saying, “Hey, here are all these things that you need to do to get better.” I'm coming in here like, “Hey, here are the things that have helped me throughout my journey of being a golfer.”

It might help you; it might not. I hope it's more of a conversation. I hope I can read some comments someday and find out new ideas and things like that.

So what will be the topics of this? I really think it's a mix of everything. So this first episode is just kind of an introduction, as I'm sure a lot of first podcasts are. But I hope I'm talking about anything like stories, trips, different golf gear, culture, and actual PGA events. The Ryder Cup wasn’t too long ago, so I'm sure I'll talk about that at some point.

So I like to say that it's just anything and everything golf.

And then it's also an avenue to share Birdie Board updates — and it's a passion of mine at this point to build this app for others. I love that I have the opportunity to have an avenue to share updates.

So I think that's really the intro to what the podcast is and my goals for it.

What is Birdie Board?

So let me back up to July of last year. I went on a golf trip — probably the biggest golf trip I’ve ever been on. I've gone on some weekend trips with a couple of guys, but this trip was unique — eight of us planned a golf trip in Ocean City, New Jersey.

And this wasn't just, “Hey, we're going to go play some rounds.” This was like, “Okay, we want to be competitive as we go through it.” It was kind of like a Ryder Cup format.

Across three days, we had three separate golf rounds. The first day we played one course, the second day another, and the third day — as you can imagine — yet another course.

It was cool that we played at three different courses. People ask me that all the time: “Oh, did you do the same course every day?” No — we did three separate courses, which was a lot of fun.

So how we set this up from the beginning was kind of like a Ryder Cup format. I say “kind of” because, in the Ryder Cup, the pros play 18 holes to earn a point, split a point, or lose and get nothing.

Instead of doing a whole round, we did it hole-by-hole, so there were a lot more points up for grabs. We still split our eight guys into two separate groups and tried to make the handicaps as even as possible.

We did a red team and a blue team. The best golfer in our group was around an eight handicap, and the worst was 36 — just to give you a range. At the time, I was playing about a 17. I actually think that was a little low, because I never even got close to that the whole weekend.

The first day, we did Team Stableford. If you're not familiar with Stableford, it's a different type of scoring for golf. Instead of low score wins, you get points for each hole.

For example, there are two different scales — modified Stableford and regular. Regular is what we did.

Zero points for double bogey, one point for bogey, two for par, three for birdie, four for eagle, five for albatross. And if you didn't know, what's above an albatross is a condor. I don't know if it's ever officially been achieved, but that would get you six points in the Stableford scale.

Now, you might ask, “Why would you have eagle, albatross, and condor — how rare are those?” Well, they're pretty rare, but we were playing with handicaps.

For example, the guy who had a 36 handicap got a par on a par-3. He was able to get two strokes deducted from his score, giving him a net hole-in-one. So there are ways for people to get those lower scores, even though it's unlikely for a normal player without a handicap.

So that's how Stableford works.

On day one, everyone got their points. Let's say I got a par — that would be two points. Matt on my team got a bogey — one point. Noah got a bogey — one point. Ryan got a birdie — three points.

Our team would have seven points on that hole. But let's say the blue team, who we were playing against, got eight points — well, they won that hole. They get the point for the hole. We repeated that through all 18 holes.

By the end of day one, the red team (my team) had nine points, and the blue team had eight. Things were pretty even.

Day two, we split into duos. It was still pointed the same — the winner got a point for the hole — but it was still Stableford. We did best ball between two teammates versus two teammates. The best ball was put against the other best ball to determine who won the hole.

The last day, we did singles. It was still hole-by-hole and applied handicaps.

So that’s kind of where this started. I built this tournament — I didn’t host the whole weekend — but I took this idea of how we were playing it day by day, all the scoring, and I built an Excel (well, Google) Sheet out of it to help host the tournament.

It was cool because everyone could have it up on their phones and put in their scores live. I have a software engineering background (as you might have guessed), and I did a lot of fancy formulas to tie all the points together on one overarching sheet to show the red team vs. blue team and each day's total points.

That weekend was a blast — and a big reason was that we had this sheet doing the work for us, so we could just focus on fun and being together.

There was room for improvement though. The sheet didn’t handle handicap adjustments; those were done manually. I thought, “This could be a cool app idea.”

Fast forward — we started planning this golf trip again for 2025.

In May, I decided to take that Excel sheet and create it into an app that worked the same way.

I started building the backend — the parts you don’t see, the brains of the system. I spent about two months just building that because it was important to get the scoring right and consistent.

Then come July through September, I worked on all the UI stuff whenever I could in my free time.

Finally, in September, I was able to get the app into the App Store — and that lined up perfectly because next weekend is our 2025 trip. We're going to use Birdie Board for the very first time.

I've tested Birdie Board on smaller scales — weekend trips and stuff — but this will be the first multi-day golf round with 12 different guys.

As of right now, we have the match set up in the Birdie Board app. The lowest handicap is nine, and the highest is 29.5.

We’re splitting into two teams. One of the cool things about Birdie Board is it can take everyone who signed up, consider all their handicaps, and auto-balance teams to make them as equal as possible.

You can also manually adjust teams if you want certain matchups, but that’s how we’ve set it up.

So that’s kind of the whole story of how Birdie Board started. Would you call the first version that Excel sheet? Maybe. It had similar functionality and evolved into this app.

Essentially, what Birdie Board is solving is complex scoring — especially for multi-day rounds or different formats like Stableford or best ball. That can really complicate a golf round.

There are apps that try to solve it, but I didn’t feel like they did what we wanted. That’s what led from my Excel sheet to this app.

Birdie Board handles everything — handicaps, different game modes like stroke play, Stableford, best ball, match play. You can even input course rating and slope rating, and it handles adjustments automatically.

All the user has to do is put in their raw score — Birdie Board takes it from there. It does all the rest of the work and lets you focus on the fun and community aspect of golf.

That’s what Birdie Board is.

The vision I have for Birdie Board is that it’s something golfers love to use. The app is built to be used in conjunction with other apps.

For example, I like Arccos — it’s a golf GPS with little trackers on my clubs that record stats. Birdie Board isn’t meant to replace that. It’s not meant to replace 18Birdies. You can use it alongside those apps — let Birdie Board handle scoring and fun with friends, while you still use your stat-tracking tools.

But it can also be used by itself — if you just want to use Birdie Board to help score a match, that’s fine too.

If you’ve made it this far, I’m excited to see how it grows. I’m excited for how Birdie Board can become a bit of a golf community — a place where we can share time together and grow in the game we all love.

That’s it for this week’s episode. I’ll probably be back next week — we’ll try to do at least one episode a week. I’ll talk about the golf match we had, maybe touch on the Ryder Cup a little bit (which was just last weekend), and we’ll go from there.

We’ll just see how this podcast grows.

Thank you for listening to the first-ever Birdie Board Podcast. I look forward to having more of these in the future.

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And before your next round, grab the Birdie Board app — free on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store — and let it handle the scoring while you enjoy the game.