The Squabbit Origin Story

Back in 2015, I organized a golf trip with my closest friends to Myrtle Beach. 6 of us piled in a van and made the 17 hour drive from Toronto for an absolutely unforgettable weekend.

While playing golf in Myrtle we kept seeing funny looking squirrels with long bushy ears. After a few visits from the beverage cart, we started calling them squabbits (a mix between a squirrel and a rabbit).

For some reason the name stuck and we began referring to the tournament as The Squabbit Invitational. Fast forward a couple of years and the tournament had become an annual tradition.

Since it was mostly the same guys playing every year and none of us kept an official handicap, I wanted an informal way to keep track of everyone’s handicap to make the competition more fair. I also wanted a way to have a live leaderboard so that players could see exactly where they stood during every round, instead of having to wait until the end of the tournament and all the scores were calculated.

After testing out a few apps and websites that offered some of this functionality I realized that there wasn’t a good solution that was easy to use and not too expensive. Being a software engineer, I decided it would be a fun project to try and build something myself.

So after a year of working on it, it was ready for our next Squabbit Invitational. I also realized that it wouldn’t be that hard to make it usable by anyone so I decided to launch it on the app stores as well.

In the first couple of weeks it only got a few downloads, but people really liked the app. Users kept asking for more and more features and soon enough I found myself dedicating all of my free time working on it. The app initially launched with only Strokeplay as a playable format, but soon I was adding everything from Ryder cup to Skins and I learned how vastly complex different golf tournaments can be.

Fast forward 5 years and Squabbit is now being used by hundreds of thousands of golfers across more than 40 countries. It has grown so much bigger than I ever could have imagined and I am more excited than ever for what’s to come!

P.S. for all those unsure of the pronunciation, Squabbit rhymes with rabbit, it's not Sqwahbit 😆