Arjun Chowdri has been with the PGA of America for eight years.Courtesy photo
Arjun Chowdri is the chief innovation officer of the PGA of America, an organization of around 29,000 golf industry professionals and facilities in the U.S. He’s been with the organization for eight years, first starting out as a senior director of marketing and then a senior director of global and corporate strategy before assuming his current position in January 2019.
At the PGA, one of his goals is to use innovation to increase golf participation among younger generations of athletes and fans. Chowdri had played golf just a handful of times before joining the organization and says his novice status gave him a unique perspective about how the PGA can grow beyond its core audience.
Chowdri has an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the University of Oregon. Prior to joining the PGA, he worked in marketing at Coca-Cola. Earlier this year, he was named to Sports Business Journal’s Forty Under 40. SportTechie recently caught up with him to discuss golf’s return from the pandemic, how the PGA managed programs during the months-long quarantine, and the technology that he thinks can expand the sport’s footprint.
What has learning to play golf taught you about the industry?
It allows me to provide an outside perspective as it relates to experiencing the good things and the pain points of the new golfer journey—and I’m able to talk about how we can start breaking down the barriers on why I didn't initially think golf was for someone like me, and thinking about the business generally from a different vantage. What I have learned in my golfer journey is that golf, like most sports and things worth pursuing in life, is incredibly difficult to be great at, but incredibly easy to enjoy.
How did PGA of America transition into quarantine?
The most important thing to bring up is our people. The first point of transition was getting everyone set up to work from home. Luckily, our tech team has increased its capabilities over the last year or so and we had just made a significant transition to G Suite. Our whole staff was trained on it a few months ago. Our team was a rockstar in providing us the ability to have as seamless a transition as you can.
We’re a multi-pronged organization. At our core, we are a trade association of local golf professionals, and we also run a number of events and programs from the PGA Championship to the PGA Jr. League and the PGA Works Collegiate Championship. We had to immediately think about those events and what to do for the safety of people and the health of the business from a long-term perspective.
As an executive team, we do a call every single morning together to discuss critical decisions that need to be made and discussed. Do we do that now? Can it be postponed until we have more information? What are the implications of doing that? Is it a cancellation or postponement? Most have been around that mentality: Is it a business as regular, postponement, cancellation, or virtual opportunity?
A good example of that is the PGA Works Collegiate Championship and career workshop. We obviously weren’t able to run the golf event, but what we’ve done is still create a virtual career workshop. Last week was supposed to be the 2020 PGA Championship at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco. Obviously that didn't happen and it’s been postponed to the beginning of August.
What are some of your biggest takeaways from this pandemic?
One of the beautiful things I’ve noticed in this situation is that a crisis like this can bring out the best in people. Golf has traditionally been pretty fragmented, but you’ve seen the association come together for the betterment of the game. We had all commissioners and CEOs working together on developing a schedule that would be good for the game. The PGA Championship, the U.S. open and Masters will all be played. And that’s a function of people coming together and really deciding what’s in the long-term best interest and health of the game.
Tell us about the Golf Emergency Relief Fund and how that helped members and local chapters.
As an industry, we developed the fund to provide short-term financial assistance to certain industry workers affected by COVID-19. The phase 1 wrapping up this week provides grants of $500 or $1,500. In phase 2, people will be able to apply for larger grants up to $3,500. PGA is donating $5 million and matching up to $2.5 million in hopes of getting the fund up to $10 million. We had to close Phase 1 in 24 hours after several thousand applied, which was a testament to the need.
For our 41 local chapters that are independent businesses, we have been providing financial support, advice and guidance on things like moving events to virtual. How can we help people in the industry get to the other side of this? We have a lot of shared services with our sections, so we’re working with them to help get them through the other side of this.
What advice can you provide to other sports execs who are still managing this crisis?
We’re in a fortunate, or unfortunate situation depending on how you look at it, where our CEO Seth Waugh has managed people through a number of crises. He was at the helm of Deutsche Bank during the financial crises and he’s been able to provide us downstream advice on a strategic level in terms of what we should be thinking about.
But the biggest thing is being human throughout all of this. You read a lot of articles on how empathy is really important at this time, and it’s true. Everyone is dealing with a lot. So start every conversation with a point of understanding. Also, connectivity. For an organization like us that has been in-person primarily, we’ve lost our traditional way of communicating. So how do you ensure more frequent forms of communication to create that connectivity? We’re making sure we’re having more frequent company-wide calls than we ever did. Is it perfect? No. We’re all kind of learning through it, but we’re trying, and I believe we’re succeeding and that it will lend itself to a stronger culture coming out of this.
How is the PGA connecting with golf fans during the pandemic?
We're still going through that. It hasn’t stopped at this point. We don’t know what the future is going to hold right now so we’re continuing to think through options. We’ve done some tactical things, developed certain content specific to the pandemic, done some work with WGT Golf to create a virtual tournament for people. These are all efforts to keep people engaged. We’re also creating at-home coaching content.
We, as an organization, as a driver of grassroots participation, are continuing to engage participants in the game. They’re the tangible connection to the 24 million people who play the game. So how do we help those people feel like they can engage in some sort of activity around the game?
Also, frankly, golf is able to be played in a socially distant manner. So we’ve been focused on that dialogue as well. As operators: how can you set up your facility in a way that it can be done? And what are the guidelines to ensure your own safety as well as well as the safety of others?
How are you managing golf’s return?
We recently released Back2Golf, a plan outlining operational guidelines for golf’s 16,000-plus facilities to adhere to nationally established protocols and best practices and CDC guidelines. We modeled this operational playbook against the three-phase approach consistent with the guidelines.
Our goal is to ensure that the facilities that have remained operational, or are going to open soon, do so in a responsible manner. We want to make sure the sport comes back in the most responsible and healthy way. Golf offers outdoor recreational and health benefits and it’s something you can experience together, like a bike ride or walk in the park. We want to put our best foot forward in terms of offering a path back. It’ll be a new normal in our country, but we believe golf can offer opportunities for a lot of people who are feeling isolated or stuck.
Did you watch the PGA Tour’s TaylorMade Driving Relief charity event with Ricky Fowler, Matthew Wolff, Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson?
I have a 7-year-old and 5-year-old. My 7-year-old watched the whole thing with me and he’s never watched more than 15 minutes of sports with me on TV. He was excited. He loved that it was for this greater cause. I told him about the different charities that are benefiting and it drew him in even more.
Golf has the opportunity to lead the way back in sports and it makes me even more enthused about the opportunities ahead in August. Doing the right thing is everything, especially as it relates to attracting the younger generations. They lead with purpose and our ability to do that will create more love for the sport.
People were starving for content. It provided people with some live sport to enjoy and some much-needed reprieve. I think the PGA Tour tried to show good examples of social distancing to be models, they did virtual high-fives to be role models to the broader public, the charities were highlighted to show purpose.
What are some of the biggest innovations you’re pursuing right now at PGA of America?
Innovation doesn’t always need to be technology. We started the PGA Jr. League a few years ago, which is modeled in a similar manner to Little League baseball. Kids get jerseys, they play on a team, there are scramble formats. It’s only nine holes. It’s a team program where kids are inviting kids in—60,000-plus kids participated last year. You can change formats sometimes to really drive engagement.
As a kid, I could have been terrible at golf but I would’ve still gotten pizza with the team and that would’ve made me happy. Golf teaches kids so much in terms of ethics and patience, and you add on the benefits of team and camaraderie, and it’s really as a parent it’s a great opportunity to help develop kids. We’re seeing incredible growth from a youth perspective. We’re also seeing people participate in the sport coming from groups who didn't before.
And then for the COVID-19 transition, we’re delivering more educational programs virtually. At any time we have a couple thousand people going through our education system trying to become PGA members. Typically we’ll have people come to our education center, do a one-week program, so all of that in-person education has been translated to a virtual learning environment.
What’s the most impactful technology in sports?
I’ve been focused on technology and innovation that comes from outside of sport and how it can be leveraged for the benefit of the industry. When you look at technologies that are attempting to solve larger scale issues, there’s usually more resources being put against it.
One example: agriculture technology. Golf grass is, in essence, a specialty crop. So what are the technologies being developed in agriculture that we can use to help maintain/monitor golf courses? I met these really intelligent and accomplished women out of San Francisco who had found a way to hack soil engineering. If you can understand what’s in the ground better, you can maintain your crop better. It’s historically been expensive, but they found a way to hack it so mom and pop farms could use it, and now golf courses.
Also, education technologies and retail. We have some 15,000 facilities, which are primarily run on an individual basis. Are there ways to aggregate those technologies to help those small businesses? There’s a lot of tech and innovation outside of sport that I believe can be leveraged to really drive the health and sustainability of golf courses.
How might sports look or feel different in the future?
It’s not just about sport. It’s really about any gathering space. It’s retail. Frankly, the answer is I don’t know. While we’re in it, there’s the immediate near-term after where people are still suffering from the memory of it. Then there’s the longer term. I know people need experiences and people need people. As humans, we’re herd animals, so I believe we’ll want to continue to enjoy experiences and will want to enjoy experiences with others. How fast we move into that I think is going to be different for every person. We’re experiencing that right now. Some people are participating and some are not and I think that’s all a personal choice and should be respected.
Question? Comment? Story idea? Let us know at talkback@sporttechie.com
