Double Teeing in Myrtle Beach: Why Your 10am Tee Time Is Hard to Find

Ask a group of visiting golfers what time they would like to play and most of them say the same thing: somewhere around ten in the morning. Late enough for breakfast, early enough to be finished for lunch, and warm enough that the first tee shot is not struck in a jacket. It is the most requested hour of the day on the Grand Strand, and it is very often the hour nobody can get. The reason is a piece of tee sheet mechanics called double teeing.

What double teeing actually means

A course that double tees starts groups from the 1st tee and the 10th tee at the same time, running two lines of play at once. Your foursome may be sent to the back nine to begin, play the 10th through the 18th, and then make the turn and finish on the front. The scorecard is the same, the yardage is the same, and the round is the same eighteen holes. Only the order changes.

Courses will describe this to you in different ways at the counter. You may hear that you are off the back, on the tens, or on the second side. It all means the same thing. Some courses go further and run a shotgun start, where every group in a field of players begins on a different hole at the same moment, though that is normally reserved for tournaments and large outings rather than daily play.

Why Myrtle Beach does it and most home courses do not

At a private club with a settled membership, single teeing is easy. Play trickles onto the course through the day, and there is no pressure to fill every slot. Myrtle Beach works nothing like that. This is a visitor market with more than sixty courses on a strip of coast roughly sixty miles long, and the courses are competing for groups who are here for four days and want to play a round every one of them. The tee sheet is the product, and an empty hour on it cannot be sold again tomorrow.

Double teeing is how a course sells the whole morning instead of half of it. It is not a trick played on visitors. It is the reason there are enough morning tee times in the market for a group of twelve to play together at eight o clock on a Tuesday in April in the first place.

The arithmetic behind it

Picture a course that only starts groups on the 1st tee. Most courses here run tee times in eight, nine or ten minute increments, so a foursome leaving the first tee takes somewhere over two hours to reach the 10th. For that whole period the back nine sits empty. Nobody is playing it, nobody is paying for it, and there is no way to recover the time later in the day.

Put a number on it. Two and a quarter hours of empty back nine at nine minute intervals is roughly fifteen tee times that never existed. At four golfers a time that is around sixty rounds the course could have sold and did not. Run that every day of a busy spring and it becomes the difference between a strong season and an average one.

The green fee is only the first part of the loss. Sixty golfers who never arrive are also sixty golfers who do not take a cart, do not buy a sleeve of balls or a glove in the pro shop, do not order at the turn and do not sit down for a beer afterwards. On many courses the food, beverage and merchandise spend per golfer is a meaningful share of the day, and it disappears with the tee time. Double teeing recovers all of it for the cost of nothing more than a starter and a second cart staging area.

What golfers ask for, and what that does to availability

Golfer preference in Myrtle Beach is heavily weighted to the morning. Summer groups want to be finished before the heat and the afternoon thunderstorms. Spring and autumn groups want the first side of the day so the afternoon is free for a second round, the beach or dinner. Very few people call and ask for one thirty in the afternoon.

That demand does not spread evenly across the morning, either. It piles up between about seven thirty and ten. Because a double teeing course fills both of its starting points from the very first slot, those hours sell out first, and they sell out early in the booking calendar. In the busy weeks it is common for a course to have very little left after around nine thirty in the morning, with the next genuine availability sitting in the early afternoon. The exact cutoff moves course to course and week to week, so treat that as the pattern rather than a rule.

The practical consequence for a group is simple. The tee times everyone wants are not scarce because the course is holding them back. They are scarce because double teeing lets the course sell twice as many of them at once, and they still go.

What it means for your round

Starting on the 10th is not a downgrade, and in a few ways it is the better half of the deal. You are usually further from the clubhouse and the practice area at the start, so allow a few extra minutes on arrival. You finish on the 9th green rather than in front of the clubhouse, which some players like and some do not. Pace can differ slightly between the two sides while both fields settle. And you play the closing stretch of the course in the middle of your round instead of at the end, which changes how a course like Kings North or Tidewater feels but takes nothing away from it.

If it matters to your group, say so when the package is being put together. Wanting all four rounds off the 1st tee, or wanting everyone in a group of sixteen going out at the same time rather than split across two starts, is a normal request. It just needs to be made early, because it narrows the tee times that will work.

The short version

Double teeing means groups start on the 1st and the 10th at once. Courses do it because a single tee start leaves the back nine empty for over two hours every morning, which costs them a stack of rounds and everything those golfers would have spent alongside the green fee. It is also the reason there is as much prime morning golf available here as there is. Book the early hours well ahead, be relaxed about which nine you begin on, and tell us if your group has a preference.

Ready to plan the golf around the tee times rather than the other way round? Call (888) 796-4652 or build a package online, and read morning versus afternoon tee times or browse the full course list while you are deciding.