Ties are broken only after play is completed. Until that time, same scores are ranked by time of finish and are not officially placed.
Beginning in 2025, NHSGA will break ties by looking at the holes by stroke index, starting with the number 1 stroke index hole, and moving through the holes in stroke index order until the tie is broken. (We previously used the USGA recommended tie breaking, card review of the last nine, last six, last three, last hole.) Using the allegedly "hardest" to "easiest" method is fairer for our formats, which usually have half the field finishing their round on the front nine.
If -- in the final leaderboard, after all scoring is complete by all golfers -- you see more than one person or team with the same final score, but the "Position" column shows one of them finished higher than the other, that is a result of the application of the tie-breaker method.
And, if you see a hyphen ("-") instead of a number in the position column for a player or team in the gross leaderboard, they finished at that position or higher in the net leaderboard. And vice versa.