Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports

The Pinehurst Terrapin Classic (PTC) is a five day, 16 player, annual golf tournament that includes match-play and scramble rounds. Pairings must be created for each day of the tournament that ensure each pair of participants play on the same team at least once during the tournament, and ensure that the teams for each scramble round are of comparable ability. Over the past four years, both a simple interactive, spreadsheet-based heuristic and an integer programming model have been developed to create the pairings. These both rely on very special properties of the structure of this tournament. In this paper, we describe this structure, the methods used to create the pairings and the experience with the use of these methods over the most recent years.