GOLF POST COVID HOW ARE WE DOING?...

Earlier this year we noted that much of the talk at the 2024 NGCOA Business Conference and PGA Show in Orlando had been about just how well golf had continued to perform post COVID despite the common wisdom having been that the game should have experienced some form of correction – not a return to pre-COVID numbers, but certainly a dip from the heights golf had achieved when it was for a year or more the only game in town.

Just as for-example is not proof and correlation is not causation, “talk” is not evidence and anecdote is not intelligence. So, we shared this optimism as encouraging but warned against drawing any conclusions until it could be corroborated by hard data.

SCGA Public Affairs pays close heed to local and regional numbers but not so much to state and national numbers. We knew that the local numbers issued publicly by Southern California’s municipalities had been yielding a clear pattern of 2023 growth over 2022 growth heaped atop 2021 growth. We also knew that numbers drawn from what the NGF identifies as the most golf starved market in the nation might be more anomalous than representative of the game writ large – something about the danger of drawing grandiloquent conclusions from an unrepresentative data base.

So, we were pleased to discern a large measure of that corroboration in Jim Koppenhaver’s lead story in the June issue of “The Pellucid Perspective” – specifically, a summary of the 2023 edition of the “Golfer Survey” Pellucid produces annually to provide the industry with data driven metrics regarding growth, play, demography, participation, velocity, and engagement – metrics that when compared year over year provide some measure of insight into whether the game is moving forward, backward, or treading water in achieving its purported strategic goals. In an industry short on metrics and data points, Pellucid offers relief in the form of a “just-the-facts” approach to the subject that always resists the easy temptations of false optimism and “spin.”

Pellucid’s 2023 “facts” do indeed support the optimism expressed in Orlando earlier this year, but within some of those positive numbers are some cautionaries that the game would be wise to take seriously before they devolve into negatives.

But first, some of the key positives.

• Annual rounds per capita up 3% over 2022.
• Component rate of participation rate up 3% - the 4^th consecutive year of growth in the percentage of the American population that plays golf (2019-2023).
• Demographics –
  • Largest sector of growth in 2023 was among those18–34-years of age.
  • Junior golfers (under 18) again matching their 10% 2022 growth.
  • More women than men added to the game’s increased 2023 numbers in both bodies and participation rates.
• The 3-year annual growth metric has peaked at roughly 2% but shows no sign of abating – plateauing probably, but not moving back in the direction of the game’s 2019 numbers.

Okay, so where are the negatives in four years of sustained growth, not just overall growth, but growth among the two sectors the game has long deemed as central to its long-term sustainability – women and youth (18-34)?

They are not so much negatives as cautionaries, harbingers of trends that merit the game’s attention, lest we find ourselves in that all too common position of reacting to events that could have been managed much more effectively had they been addressed upon initial discovery.

There are two such cautionaries.

1. Yes, women’s participation in the game is growing faster than male participation and doing so not as a function of a displacement that would leave the game treading water, but as an addition thereto; however, even after some years of faster growth, female participation remains in the 20-25% range nationally, albeit a bit higher than that in Southern California. Will the additional “fact” that girl’s participation in junior and school programs now approximates that of boys result in that number reaching 50% at some point as a result? That’s the hope, and it’s a credible hope, but we just won’t know for a long time whether the game’s investments and commitments into women’s and girls’ golf pay off.
2. All the gain in golf’s 2023 numbers took place in the highest income quintile, where they were considerably greater than 3%. The game lost participants among those whose individual incomes were less than $75K annually. In golf’s previous growth spurts (pre-2005) the opposite was the case; the game grew as fast if not often faster across the income quintiles. Today’s “positives” are being driven by the asset class – those whose livelihoods are derived at least in part by properties, equities, and other instruments whose values have been outperforming traditional paychecks for some time. While certain aspects of the game’s player base have been growing steadily (women, young persons, persons of color, and other non-traditional golf audiences), this aspect, the one that served as golf’s growth and diversification incubator for the game’s first 100 years on American soil, is atrophying. Golf would be wise to consider the implications – both market and social/political – of losing traction with 80% of the population – “market” in terms of the challenge posed by pursuing a larger share of a smaller market – “social/political” in terms of the challenge posed by keeping in the good graces of those elected to office by the 80% who have been priced out of the game.

Koppenhaver opens and closes the summary with the following conundrum. When the game floundered after having grown steadily between 1946 and 2005, the industry’s cognoscenti attributed the game’s problems to three factors: Time, money, and difficulty – too much time to play a round, too much money to play it, and too much aggravation for all but the most skilled players. Yet with all three factors still firmly in play post COVID, the game continues to grow year over year. Either they got it wrong, or we’re headed off a cliff the edge of which we just can’t yet see.

That’s the problem with conundrums; they can only be solved by conjecture, and everyone is entitled to their own conjectures – opinions too. And here is ours. When for a time COVID rendered golf the only outdoor recreational activity available to active recreational enthusiasts, they were forced to discover what all avid golfers understand – that four hours in nature with good friends far away from the hustle and bustle of the world and emails/virtual meetings playing a game that changes each day with the rhythms of nature offers something that few things in modern American life offer. And offers it at a price point much less expensive than many of the high tech/electronic substitutes that mimic traditional games/sports. These new and rejuvenated devotees underscored for the golf industry that simple principle from their college economics 101 – that it is the unique niche that distinguishes one activity from another in a world filled with an almost unlimited supply of them.

There may be “cautionaries” lurking in all the good news, but as long as the game understands, anticipates, and resolves to tackle them, the unique lure of the game should add another 600 years to the game’s current 600-year run of success.

 - Public Affairs Team