Vital Signs, july 18, 2014

     The National Golf Foundation has a glass-half-full theory about millennials, the demographic group so vital to our industry’s future, and it goes like this: “Millennials don’t reject golf, they are just delaying entry to the game.” A fair number of assumptions, suppositions, and educated guesses go into making such a hypothesis, but, as we all know, the NGF prefers to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. So never mind that, as the NGF’s own research indicates, today’s millennials (defined as 18- to 34-year-olds) play far less golf than their counterparts of the 1990s. Instead, believe in the NGF’s prophesy: “As this generation ages, golf participation will gradually increase.” If that sentence sounds familiar, it’s probably because the NGF once made a similar prediction about another generation of Americans, the Baby Boomers, who were expected to take up golf in droves once they reached retirement age. As it turned out, Baby Boomers found other things to do with their leisure time. And millennials may very well end up doing the same.

     Only one of every 19 people in England plays golf, but the golf industry is nonetheless a significant contributor to the nation’s economy. The total contribution: £3.4 billion, according to an analysis that mined data from the years 2011 and 2012. Sports Marketing Surveys, Inc., the company that crunched the numbers, believes golf’s economic impact in England would be even greater if more women took up the sport and if it wasn’t so darned cold and rainy all the time.

     Private clubs from coast to coast may still be suffering through hard times, but there’s one place where they’ve recovered nicely: New York City. “There’s no golf recession in the metro area,” writes the New York Post, because “the financial top dogs” on Wall Street (not to mention “the minions under them”) are spending part of their year-end bonuses (in many cases, just a small part) on golf-club memberships. “They’re making money again, they’ve got expense accounts, they’re making deals -- and they’re doing that playing golf at the country club,” Tom Stine of Golf Datatech told the newspaper. Now you know why, with each passing day, the Great Recession appears a little smaller in corporate America’s rear-view mirror.

     For the second straight year, according to calculations done by Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday, the Grand Strand’s golf season has gotten off to a disappointing start. The number of paid rounds played on the marketing group’s network of courses in March, April, and May of this year fell by 3 percent from the same period in 2013 -- a major frustration, because the spring is the Strand’s high season and a harbinger of rounds to come. The local golf industry is hoping to avoid another full-year performance like the one it had in 2013, when the number of rounds played on its courses declined by 6 percent from 2012.

      When it comes to golf, Canadians are playing less than they once did. Citing a study by the National Allied Golf Associations, Maclean’s reports that the number of rounds played on the average Canadian course has fallen by 10 percent over the past five years. The magazine places the blame on the usual suspects (time, difficulty, expense), but it contends that “the real culprit” is the sport’s “unhealthy relationship with North America’s overheated real estate market.” The NAGA believes that the nation has 5.7 million golfers, but it admits that only about a quarter of them (1.5 million) play regularly.

     Ireland’s golf clubs have lost nearly 26 percent of their members since the onset of the Great Recession, according to data provided by the nation’s golf unions. The Golf Union of Ireland and the Irish Ladies Golf Union report that the nation’s clubs had 229,000 members in 2007, a number that’s dropped to 170,000 today. The clubs have lost 47,000 men (a decline of 27 percent) and 12,000 women (a decline of 23 percent).