For most of the past 20 years, Jim Koppenhaver has been as welcomed at the annual PGA Merchandise Show as the Grim Reaper at a home for the elderly. Every January, the lanky, bespectacled Koppenhaver would arrive from Chicago in one of his multicolored sweaters, looking like a modern-day Joseph come to share hard truths with his golf brethren.
On the second day of each show, Koppenhaver and sidekick Stuart Lindsay would set up their laptops in a large meeting room in Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center and deliver a stats-intensive postmortem on the state of golf. The news almost invariably was bad. The sugar high of 2000, when Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet and some 30 million Americans played a then-record 518 million rounds of golf, was a distant memory. Over the next two decades, golf lost nearly one-third of those golfers and 90 million rounds. More than 1,600 golf courses closed, and Koppenhaver’s biggest gripe was that the closures were happening too slowly, prolonging the pain.
Then things got really weird. The worst thing to happen in recent memory — COVID-19 — turned out to be one of the best things to happen to golf.
After the initial COVID wave in early 2020, golf benefited from being one of the few recreational options available to many lockdown-weary Americans. During that COVID-shortened season, Americans played 60 million more rounds than they did in 2019 — golf’s best year since 2012. Koppenhaver estimates that in 2020, an unprecedented 3.3 million golfers were new to the game. That trend has slowed, but is still strong, with 1.8 million rookies taking up the game in 2022.
We nearly went below 20 million golfers, Koppenhaver said, “but due to COVID, we’re now much healthier and moving up.”
The post-lockdown trend was immediate. Peter Harrity’s two New Hampshire courses were open for two weeks in March 2020, then closed for six weeks before reopening with a jampacked tee sheet on May 11. “Our thoughts were that we’d be back to the usual demand on May 12, but that wasn’t the case,” Harrity recalled. “There have been no signs of a slowdown.”
Koppenhaver, who had been so prophetic in documenting Americans’ disaffection with golf over the previous two decades, was as surprised as anyone to note that the game has never been stronger. In January, he reported that more Americans spent money playing rounds of golf — 520 million — than ever before.
“We gained back in five years what it took us 18 years to lose,” Koppenhaver said. “I’ve never seen a hockey stick like that before.”
It’s probably a reach to say that COVID caused the golf boom. Brooks West, owner of Franklin Bridge Golf Club in Franklin, Tennessee, thinks of COVID as an “accelerant” that was introduced at the ideal time. Now the biggest problem for many courses is a lack of daylight to accommodate demand for tee times.
“I’ve been at this facility for 27 years, and the last three years have been unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” said Joe Williams, general manager at Indian Wells Golf Resort in the California desert. “It’s almost to the point where, on certain days, we can’t charge enough.”
In early January, Williams looked at his tee sheet for Super Bowl weekend and realized he was almost sold out. His base rate is $259 per round, but the rate for that weekend already had been raised to $279, and Williams’s dynamic-pricing software bumped it up again, to $299. So Williams raised it again, to $329, with no pushback from customers.
Demand has reached the point where Williams extended his booking window from 60 days to 90 days. But there’s a catch: Anyone booking more than 60 days in advance must pay a $20 premium.
“It used to be if you booked far in advance, you’d get a discount,” Williams said. “Now you’re paying a premium.”
At Delcastle Golf Course in Wilmington, Delaware, where the green fees are $200 less than at Indian Wells, the trend is the same. Delcastle did 32,894 rounds in 2018, the industry’s low point. By 2020, that number grew to 47,212. Matt Storck, Delcastle’s general manager, said he anticipated a plateau in 2023, but instead hit a new peak of 56,262 rounds – 43% higher than in the year prior to COVID. Now, every day feels like the weekend at Delcastle.
“Pre-COVID we would only get close to 300 rounds a day on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday,” Storck said. “Post-COVID, we prepare for that every day of the week. We’ve had Mondays through Thursdays doing 275 rounds or more.”
Storck and his counterparts say they’re seeing more young professionals playing on weekdays, and attribute much of that to the growing acceptance of remote work in the post-COVID era.
At Falmouth Country Club on Cape Cod, general manager Matt Burgess said he sees more people staying near the Massachusetts beaches rather than commuting to the city. “People aren’t going to sit in a cubicle in Boston,” he said.
Despite losing the first six weeks of the 2020 season to the state lockdown, Falmouth’s rounds of golf jumped 41%, to 54,928, from 2019.
“You could tell which governors didn’t play golf,” Burgess said. “[Then-Massachusetts Gov.] Charlie Baker made it clear he didn’t play golf.”
But more of Baker’s former constituents are playing than ever before. Falmouth’s rounds continue to grow, hitting 57,308 in 2023.
“We had major gaps on the tee sheet pre-COVID, when the morning rush was over and people were waiting to get the discounted afternoon rates,” Burgess said. “Now it’s just busy throughout the whole day.”
Unlike the illusory gains of 25 years ago, there’s the sense that golf is better positioned this time around for long-term growth. “At that time, it was people spending corporate Amex dollars on golf. Today we see people spending their own dollars,” said Kris Strauss, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Troon, the nation’s largest course operator.
The corporate dollars dried up during the banking crisis 15 years ago, but in their place came more of what Strauss calls “bunny slopes and entry points,” pointing to entertainment venues such as Topgolf, Popstroke, or Troon’s new Golfzon Social, a bar-and-simulator experience for urban areas.
“There are more ways to get golf clubs into people’s hands today,” Strauss said, noting that the Troon Rewards loyalty program has grown from 57,000 new members in 2020 to 80,000 in the past two years.
For course owners such as Harrity, their chief focus is on converting those millions of Topgolf customers — many of whom have never played a traditional round of golf — into green-grass customers.
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Taking a cue from those entertainment venues, course operators also have become more welcoming, less stodgy. West is a “card-carrying purist,” but when he bought Franklin Bridge five years ago, he realized most of his customers weren’t. They don’t like strict dress codes and stern course marshals constantly nudging them to pick up the pace. “We set out from the beginning not to be that — to allow T-shirts, music playing, very few rules,” West said.
Whatever the formula, it seems to be working. After two decades of being golf’s bearer of bad news, Koppenhaver is surprised, but happy, that the trend lines have turned positive.
Martin Kaufmann has been writing about sports, business, and travel for more than 30 years, including 16 years as a senior editor at Golfweek magazine.
