oobgolf.com helps players track their game

If you are a golfer who wants to know your game better, or perhaps you’re planning a vacation in Vermont or Arizona and want to find the perfect course to play, you should consider visiting oobgolf.com. The Web site, supported by ads, is free to join and use.

Kevin Langdon and Andrew Brown founded Oobgolf in 2006 with the goal to make the site your “online caddy.” In the true fashion of the Internet, Langdon lives in Lewisburg, Penn., while Brown is in Baltimore.

The site has golfing news, polls and columns. Unlike many other golf sites, oobgolf lets members post comments or discuss golf news directly under each story.

The course finder is one of the best on the Internet. You can search by course architect; greens fees; public, military, private or resort courses; total yardage; USGA rating; or USGA slope. Plus, it offers user ratings for those courses and a direction system with MapQuest maps to get you to your tee.

A new gem of a feature is a “wiki” database. This is a first for the amateur golfer, where users can associate their scores to the equipment they use. Think of this as your online “golf bag” where you can match the make and model of your gear, from clubs to gloves, shoes to balls. Oobgolf reports equipment performance across all users, so site members can rate and comment on each piece of equipment in the database.

Online scorecards are available that make it easy to calculate handicaps or print custom scorecards for an upcoming round.

You can even upload scores, in real time, to oobgolf with most cell phones that have a Web browser and a data plan. Or you can do it from the club or home with a computer, after the round.

Speaking of handicap, the site soon will have a section to aid golfers in obtaining an Official USGA handicap card. “We want it to be as legitimate and trusted as an offline method of acquiring a USGA card,” Langdon said.

Brown could not say if the site would charge members to get a handicap card.

Oobgolf.com also has a golfer-of-the-week profile. It can be someone famous like golf writer Geoff Shackelford, or even Liberty Lake resident and retired surgeon Hugh Dame.

Dame said he loves using the site because it’s easy to use. “I love it because it is free to use and allows me to follow my game.”

Oobgolf now says it has more than 95,000 golfers per month. It’s adding 80 members per day, Langdon said.

As far as golf fan sites go, oobgolf provides a friendly, easy-to-use set of resources about gear, courses and what other fans of the game are saying.

A similar site, covering the Northwest and parts of Canada, is gogolfnw.com, a product of Cowles Publishing Co., which publishes The Spokesman-Review. It includes course and tournament details, golf tips, and news, columns and blogs.