ATMORE — The Atmore Community Foundation will stage its first charity golf tournament on Friday, Sept. 18, at Atmore Country Club, with a format and a price built to fill the field quickly.
The tournament is a two-man scramble. Entry is $150 per team, and the field is capped at 25 teams. Organizers are urging interested players to register early, since a 25-team limit on a Friday tournament in a town the size of Atmore is not a large number of slots.
How a Two-Man Scramble Works
The scramble is the standard format for charity golf, and for good reason: it is the version of the game that lets a scratch golfer and a beginner play on the same team without anybody having a miserable afternoon.
In a scramble, both players on a team tee off. The team then selects the better of the two shots, and both players hit their next shot from that spot. The process repeats until the ball is holed. A bad drive costs nothing as long as a partner puts one in the fairway, and a missed putt is forgiven if the other player makes it.
The practical effect is pace and morale. Scores come in low, rounds finish on time, and players who golf twice a year are not holding up a foursome behind them. That is exactly what a fundraiser needs, because the point of the day is participation and dollars raised, not a competitive test of golf.
Contests, Add-Ons and Sponsorships
The tournament includes the usual slate of on-course contests and paid add-ons: closest to the pin, longest drive, mulligans at $20 each, tee busters at $20 each, food packages and hole sponsorships.
Hole sponsorships, which carry a business logo on the course, are $100 each.
Those items are where charity tournaments actually make their money. Entry fees typically cover the cost of putting on the event — the course, the carts, the food. The margin comes from sponsorships and the small purchases players make on the day: a mulligan buys a do-over on a bad shot, a tee buster buys a favorable placement, and both are essentially donations dressed up as an advantage. At $20 apiece across a full field, they add up.
Hole sponsorships work the same way from the business side. For $100, a local company gets its logo in front of every group that plays through, plus its name attached to a community fundraiser — a modest and highly local piece of advertising that also functions as a donation.
The Prizes
The prize table is unusually strong for a first-year tournament.
The longest drive and closest to the pin winners will each receive a free vacation to one of seven resorts in Antigua, Barbados or Panama.
The hole-in-one prize is a 2026 Ford F-150 XLT from Johnson Ford.
A vehicle prize of that size is what draws players who might otherwise skip a first-year event, and it is a standard feature of the charity golf circuit. Tournaments almost never put a truck at risk out of pocket; prizes at that value are typically backed by a specialized hole-in-one insurance policy, purchased for a premium far below the prize value, that pays out if a player aces the designated hole under the policy’s conditions. Those conditions usually specify the hole, a minimum yardage and the presence of independent witnesses.
The odds explain why the model works. An amateur golfer’s chances of making a hole in one on any given par 3 are commonly estimated at somewhere in the thousands-to-one range, which is why a sponsor can offer a truck and a tournament can advertise it without either party expecting to hand over the keys.
Why This Kind of Event Matters in Atmore
Atmore sits in northern Escambia County, near the Florida line and just off Interstate 65 between Mobile and Montgomery. It is a small city, and like most small Alabama cities its nonprofit and civic infrastructure runs largely on volunteer labor and locally raised money rather than on institutional grants.
Community foundations exist to formalize that. In general terms, a community foundation pools charitable contributions from local donors and directs the money back into the community it serves, often through grants to smaller organizations that do not have the staff or track record to pursue outside funding on their own. A single golf tournament is small in absolute terms, but for a young foundation it does two things at once: it raises money, and it puts the organization’s name in front of the local business community in a setting where those businesses are already accustomed to giving.
The first year of an annual event is also a proof of concept. Filling 25 teams and selling out the hole sponsorships is the argument organizers will make to sponsors next year.
How to Register
Teams interested in playing should register early, given the 25-team cap. The tournament is set for Friday, Sept. 18, at Atmore Country Club, at $150 per two-player team, with food packages, mulligans, tee busters and hole sponsorships available in addition to the entry fee.