The National Golf Foundation today released its annual participation report, which shows "another decline in the number of people who played the game at least once in the last year," according to Brian Costa of the WALL STREET JOURNAL. Plenty of people are "taking up the game for the first time, but very few of them are sticking with it." That is "less an indictment of the game itself than of the operators of the country’s more than 15,000 courses." NGF President & CEO Joe Beditz said, "Golf needs to be more beginner-friendly." The report states that roughly 2.2 million Americans aged 6 and older "played golf for the first time" in '15, the most since '02. That is "up from a post-recession low of 1.5 million beginners" in '11. Yet the overall number of participants "still fell to 24.1 million, a marginal drop from 24.7 million" in '14 and down from a peak of 30 million in '05. Nearly 90% of the people who left the game in '15 "never became regular golfers, which the NGF defines as playing at least eight times per year." Taken together, the numbers "portray a business that is being handed new customers, through the sheer allure of the game, and which lacks either the ability or the interest to turn them into devoted regulars." Tiger Woods said, "How do you keep it fun? That’s one of the things we’re running into right now with the game of golf. It’s just stagnant. We have people come into the game but they exit the game. There’s no sustainability." Costa writes one issue is that the typical golf course is "not set up for beginners to ease their way in" (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 3/8).
