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Every golf outing has them: the foursome that turns a routine par 3 into a fifteen-minute standoff while three groups stack up behind them, watching someone hunt for a provisional 50 yards into the rough. You can't get rid of the weak group. But you can plan your shotgun start so their pace doesn't sink the whole field.
Most organizers try to spot slow groups by gut feel on the morning of the event, which is about as reliable as picking a Powerball number. By the time you notice a group is dragging, they've already built a backup that takes three holes to clear.
Build slow-group detection into registration instead. Ask team captains to self-report an honest handicap range, and pay attention to which teams are corporate groups with mostly once-a-year golfers versus teams stacked with regular players.
A team of four 25-handicaps is a near-guarantee for a long day, and you'll know it two weeks out instead of on the first tee.
Skill isn't the only variable, either. A group of solid golfers who stop for photos at every hole, run a side-bet calculation after each shot, or reset for a mulligan on both tee shots can be just as slow as a genuine beginner foursome.
Ask your check-in volunteers to flag any team that seems more interested in the day than the scorecard, since that's a pace risk your handicap data will never show you.
Every course has one or two holes where the field naturally backs up, and it's rarely the hole you'd guess. Walk the course with the head pro a week or two before your event and ask specifically about long par 3s, reachable par 5s, and any hole with a forced carry or blind approach, since those are where golfers take extra swings and extra time regardless of skill level.
Research on pace of play backs this up: the International Journal of Golf Science's factory-model analysis found that the whole course only moves as fast as its slowest hole, so identifying that one choke point matters more than optimizing anywhere else.
Don't stop at one bottleneck. Most courses have a front-nine chokepoint and a separate back-nine chokepoint, and treating them as a single problem means you'll only fix half of it.
Once you know your bottleneck holes, start your slowest groups there instead of somewhere easier. It sounds backwards, but a slow group that starts on the bottleneck hole gets it out of the way immediately, while a slow group that reaches the bottleneck three holes into their round arrives right as the backup is forming and makes it worse.
There's a sequencing trap here that catches a lot of organizers: don't put all your weak groups on the same one or two starting holes. If every slow team tees off on hole 4 at the same shotgun horn, you've just created your bottleneck at 8:00 a.m. sharp instead of avoiding it.
Spread your weaker groups across several different starting holes so no single tee sees more than one or two of them at once.
Build in a release valve, too. Pick one short, wide-open hole near each bottleneck and treat it as your pressure valve, a place marshals can wave groups through if a backup starts to form.
It won't fix a bad pace day, but it gives your marshals somewhere to send traffic instead of watching it pile up.
A marshal who can only ask nicely won't move a group that's already forty-five minutes behind. Before the event, get the tournament committee to agree in writing on what a marshal is allowed to enforce: a hard "ready golf" reminder, a request to pick up after double bogey, or a skip-ahead at the known bottleneck hole if a group falls outside its window.
Then station your most experienced, most comfortable-with-confrontation marshal at the actual bottleneck hole, not the easy one. This is the one deployment decision that pays for itself over and over, and the USGA's Pace of Play Best Practices guide specifically recommends stationing additional marshals at known choke points rather than spreading them evenly across the course.
Some courses will default to assigning shotgun holes alphabetically by team captain's last name, which has nothing to do with pace and everything to do with convenience for whoever built the spreadsheet. Push back on this every time.
Ten minutes spent manually assigning slow groups to bottleneck holes and spreading them across multiple tees is the highest-leverage planning work you'll do all week.
Write down which groups you flagged as slow and where you started them, then check it against your actual finish times after the event. Over a few outings, this turns a gut-feel guess into a real system you can trust the next time you're staring at a stack of foursomes and a shotgun horn.