Golfers Speak: Who Belongs to a Golf Club?

I recently asked the members of the Google+ Golf Community to tell me how they felt about golf club memberships. I was curious. How many golfers actually belong to a golf club and play most of their rounds there as compared to golfers who are unaffiliated with a club?

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It’s hard to get statistics about golf and golfers, but depending on the source, the best estimate I could find is that there are about 30 million golfers in the United States and about 60 million world-wide, if you define a golfer as anyone who has played a round of golf in the last 12 months.

I don’t know that I would accept that criterion as my gold standard. My personal opinion is that those folks who show up for a round once a year — say, on Thanksgiving morning while the turkey is cooking or on 4th of July with the cousins they haven’t seen in four years — aren’t really golfers. While trying to specify the precise number of rounds per year one must play in order to be considered a “real” golfer will probably get me in a lot of trouble, I’m going to do it anyway. Just for the sake of the discussion, let’s agree for the moment that “real” golfers average a round per month over a year’s time.

That number established, where do the members of the Google+ Golf Community play their rounds? Here’s what they told me:

Only about one-third of us actually belong to a golf club and play most of our rounds there and most of us tend to play here and there, casually picking and choosing when and where we’ll play.

A number of us play locally and enthusiastically on public and semi-private courses. One member of the Golf Community said it very well:

"Muni golf all the way! I support my city courses. I sure will take an invite to play a country club as well."

Although I played my early golf on country club tracks, one of the most pleasant rounds I’ve ever played was on a muni in Louisville one fine spring afternoon when I was supposed to be sitting in a conference room with 500 colleagues listening to a keynote speech and my current home course is a muni that offers a variety of membership options. I love muni golf too!

Time and money both figure into the equation many members of the Google+ Golf Community use to make their golfing decisions. Weekend golfers struggle to find courses that aren’t overcrowded and plagued by slow play and are still affordable; and for some joining a local league that plays a rota is more satisfying than playing a single course more or less exclusively.

The golf courses that survive into the 2nd and 3rd decade of the 21st century are going to devise strategies for addressing these two concerns of younger golfers — time and money — while continuing to provide a weekday home to older golfers who truly have more leisure time at their disposal.

My home course, for example, looks very different on Tuesday morning and Sunday afternoon. There’s a golf league version of rush hour on Tuesday morning. Men’s and women’s leagues are lined up and teeing off and there’s no room for casual walk-ons. At any given time, at least a third of the players are rehabbing their knee replacements!

But Sunday afternoon is a different story entirely. The 20 and 30-somethings are out in force, sometimes same-sex foursomes but equally often double-date foursomes and occasionally parents and little children who are just learning how to swing a club, playing out that endless cycle in which the game of a lifetime reinvents itself.

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