The first time I played a Front Range charity scramble in late September and a Sonoran Preserve fundraiser in early February, I came away convinced these are not the same sport. They are not the same product, they are not the same buyer, and they are absolutely not the same business for the nonprofits running them. After tracking 555 events across both states for the 2026 season, 373 in Colorado and 102 in Arizona, the picture has only gotten sharper.
We are publishing this comparison now because Colorado and Arizona are CharityGolfer's two covered markets and the players in them are deciding where to spend their 2026 calendar. But the deeper reason to read this, whether you are a player in Charlotte, an event director in Atlanta, or a board member in Minneapolis, is that the contrast between these two markets is the cleanest case study in regional charity golf economics anywhere in the country. Almost every market in the US falls somewhere on the spectrum between them: a compressed season with deep mid-market competition (Colorado), or a long season with apex-heavy venue stock (Arizona). Reading the contrast carefully tells you exactly what kind of market you are operating in, and what that means for your tee times or your tournament.
Here is the comparison.
Season timing: the fundamental asymmetry
Colorado charity golf runs roughly May through September. Arizona runs roughly October through April. The states are almost perfect counter-programs, which is the single most underappreciated fact in the regional charity golf market.
For a player, this means you can build a twelve-month calendar that never asks you to play in the wrong weather. Spend May to September chasing the Front Range and the high country. Spend October to April working the Phoenix and Scottsdale valley. The total volume of S, A, and B-tier events across both states gives you a serious year-round slate without ever booking a 38-degree shotgun in March or a 108-degree shotgun in July.
For an event director, the timing math is harder. Colorado's window is short and brutally compressed. Every nonprofit in the state is trying to land on the same eight or nine weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day, which means competition for player wallets, sponsor dollars, and tee sheets is ferocious. Arizona's window is longer, roughly six months of viable weather, but the back half of it (March, April) collides with spring break, baseball spring training, and a flood of out-of-state corporate retreats that gobble up the best courses.
The general principle, which travels: every regional charity golf market has a viable window and a competition cliff inside that window. Colorado is the extreme case of a short window. Arizona is the extreme case of a long window with internal congestion. A Carolinas market like Charlotte or Raleigh sits closer to a middle position, a roughly seven-month window from April through October with peak congestion in May and September. The strategic question is the same everywhere: which weeks inside your window have the least competition for player attention, and which have the most. Colorado events live or die on the calendar slot. Arizona events live or die on the venue. Your market is one of those, or some combination.
Course quality and venue depth
This is where Arizona has a structural advantage and it is not close. The Phoenix-Scottsdale corridor has more nationally ranked private clubs per capita than any other metro in the country. We tracked 102 events in Arizona for 2026, and the courses behind them include Mirabel, Desert Forest, Whisper Rock, Estancia, Silverleaf, Talking Stick, Troon North, and a dozen more that any traveling golfer would clear his schedule for. The S-tier event in Arizona, the Mirabel Els for Autism at $1,000 per player, is a tournament where the course itself is two-thirds of the value proposition.
Colorado is deeper at the very top and thinner in the middle. Our S-tier event, the Bunker Bash at Ballyneal ($1,050 per player), is on what is, in our opinion, the most interesting modern course in the Mountain West. Three of our five A-tier Colorado events, including the Broadmoor National Two Man Team Championship at $2,500 per player and the Ravenna Colonel's Challenge at $750 per player, are on courses that hold up against anything in the desert. The Broadmoor National in particular is a different category of event, closer to a member-guest invitational with a charitable beneficiary than a traditional charity scramble.
But once you drop below the A-tier, the venue picture in Colorado gets ordinary fast. The 112 B-tier events run almost entirely on solid daily-fee courses and second-tier privates. The 166 C-tier events run on muni and resort tracks where the course is incidental to the cause. Arizona's B-tier (29 events) and even its C-tier (48 events) play on noticeably better stock because the desert has more good golf to begin with.
The translatable insight: every market has a shape to its venue stock. Some markets are top-heavy (a few elite clubs, then a steep drop). Some are middle-heavy (lots of solid options, few standouts). The Carolinas, for the record, is one of the most middle-heavy markets in the country: deep B-tier venue stock across both Carolinas, with apex venues like Pinehurst and Quail Hollow that are notoriously hard for charity events to book. Knowing which shape your market has tells you whether the venue is the headline or the cause is.
Entry fees and what you actually get for them
Average entry fee runs $175 per player in Colorado and $190 per player in Arizona. The $15 gap looks small in the aggregate, and it disappears at the top end (the headline events in both states run $750 to $2,500), but it matters at the middle of the market. The Arizona premium is real and it is mostly a function of venue cost. Desert courses cost more to rent for a Monday shotgun than Front Range courses do, and that cost flows straight to the player.
What you get for the fee is, in our opinion, more consistent in Arizona. The 2026 Arizona slate is heavier on real catering, real player gifts (not branded sleeves of range balls), and on-course experiences that resemble what a member-guest delivers. Colorado's middle-tier events skew more toward the classic scramble formula: range, bag drop, shotgun, sandwich at the turn, dinner, raffle. That is not a knock. It is a market difference. Colorado nonprofits run leaner events because their margins demand it.
A practical filter for any market: if a B-tier event is charging materially more than the local market average per player, the experience should be visibly better than the average events on the same calendar. If it is not, the price is wrong. This rule travels.
Format mix
Both states are dominated by scrambles. This is true everywhere in charity golf, and it is true for a reason. Scrambles are the only format that lets a 22 handicap and a 6 handicap sit in the same cart and both have fun. Stroke play and best ball are minority formats in both states, concentrated at the A and S-tier events where the field is more competitive and the entry fee is high enough to filter for serious players.
A nuance worth flagging: Colorado's A-tier has a slightly higher concentration of two-man and four-man best ball events than Arizona does, driven mostly by the Broadmoor National and a handful of member-guest-style tournaments at private clubs. Arizona's A-tier leans more toward scramble even at the high end, which is one of the reasons the Mirabel event at $1,000 a player has the field it does. The Mirabel buyer wants the course and the cause, not the competition.
If you are a player who actively dislikes scrambles, your serious slate in any US regional market gets thin fast. Plan accordingly.
Cause mix
This is where the two states diverge in a way most player-facing content ignores, and it is where local knowledge of any market becomes essential. Colorado's charity tournament economy is dominated by youth services, mental health and addiction recovery, veterans, and outdoor / environmental causes. The state has a deep bench of mid-sized nonprofits in those categories and they run a high share of the calendar.
Arizona's mix tilts harder toward medical and disease-specific causes (autism, pediatric cancer, ALS, juvenile diabetes), faith-based organizations, and education foundations tied to private schools. The Mirabel Els for Autism is the cleanest example, and there is a long tail of B-tier events with similar profiles. Arizona's charity golf scene was, for a long time, an extension of the snowbird philanthropy network, and that DNA is still visible in the cause mix.
Every regional market has a cause fingerprint shaped by its history, its demographics, and its donor base. The Carolinas leans heavily toward education foundations, military and veterans causes, and pediatric medicine. The Pacific Northwest leans heavily toward environmental and arts causes. Reading your market's fingerprint tells you which categories are saturated and which still have room.
For a player choosing where to give time and money, this matters. For a nonprofit, it matters more. A new youth mentorship tournament launching in Colorado has thirty direct competitors. The same tournament in Arizona has half that number, but it has to compete with a denser field of medical causes that have larger built-in donor bases.
The S and A-tier scoreboard
The events you should know in each state, by our 2026 rankings:
Colorado S-tier: Bunker Bash at Ballyneal, $1,050 per player. The only Colorado event that fully clears the bar of course, cause, and field.
Colorado A-tier highlights: Broadmoor National Two Man Team Championship ($2,500), Ravenna 29th Annual Colonel's Challenge ($750). Five total in the tier.
Arizona S-tier: Mirabel Els for Autism, $1,000 per player. Single S-tier event, but a strong one.
Arizona A-tier highlights: Desert Forest Southwest PGA Foundation Pro-Am ($800). Two total in the tier.
The honest read on these numbers: Colorado has more depth at the A-level (five versus two) but Arizona's two are exceptionally well-run and on better venues than four of Colorado's five. The S-tier is a wash. If you can play one event in each state in 2026, play Ballyneal in August and Mirabel in February.
What this means for your market
If you live in Colorado or Arizona, the practical takeaway is straightforward: both states are worth your calendar, and you should structure your year around the counter-seasonal advantage. If you can only play one state's calendar, choose based on what you value most: Arizona for venue depth, Colorado for cause variety and slightly better mid-tier pricing.
If you live somewhere else, the takeaway is more useful than it looks. Map your local market onto the two axes this piece has drawn: season length (short and compressed like Colorado, or long with internal congestion like Arizona, or in between) and venue stock shape (apex-heavy like Arizona, or top-and-bottom thin with little in the middle like Colorado, or middle-heavy like the Carolinas). Where your market sits on those two axes tells you almost everything about how to play it as a participant or how to run an event inside it.
CharityGolfer's coverage expands beyond Colorado and Arizona in the seasons ahead. The framework will travel with us. So will the lesson the two-state comparison teaches: the apex events are everywhere similar, the cause mix is everywhere local, and the middle of the market is everywhere where the real money and the real fight is.