Selecting Your Best Golf Buddies
Nothing can ruin a trip more than having one negative person in your group. Usually this person is just a casual acquaintance that gets invited along. The whole time you are out golfing and trying to enjoy yourself, you will find that this person is complaining and dragging down the rest of the group. Since moods are usually contagious, this person will end up infecting the rest of the group with their negativity. This can drag the entire group down to their level, and cause nothing but arguments and unpleasantness for the entire trip. Your ideal vacation will be turned into a war zone.
Often the mistake of inviting this person along can be made because you never saw this side of them. You could have played golf with someone for years, and never actually been around them outside of the course. While golfing, you do not really interact much with your fellow golfers. Therefore when you start to experience this person during the car trip or at the hotel, you will realize that they are a completely different person than you ever would have guessed.
Therefore when you are choosing the people you invite on your trip, you should always have a very rigid screening process. Make it your goal to be able to say that you have been around the person multiple times in situations besides the golf course. If you go to lunch and you find that they are complaining about their meal the entire time, then you have probably found someone to not bring.
Your entire group should be rather large. Invite everyone that you think would be bearable to be around. The benefits of a large group are that you can rotate the members of each golfing party around. By doing this, you will ensure that no two people get too tired of each other and start to build up the strife that will cause the whole group to fall apart. Outside of the golf course, you should also assign specific goals to different people. Send one guy to go get food for the group, and put one in charge of driving. This will help to not only split the workload so nobody gets too stressed out, but it will also cause the entire team to be dependent on separate people. They will feel a sense of responsibility for a group, and this is what could really bring you together.