Hello golf stakeholders:
Anyone who has ever sold anything as a profession will recognize this as the “middle of 2nd quarter”, for all the rest of you, it’s just “mid-May.” Coming up this weekend is the 2nd major of the year, the PGA Championship (it still takes a little getting used to, it coming in the initial vs. the latter half of the season), and the incessant commentary on the non-progressing PGA TOUR vs. LIV drama as professionals from both “leagues” compete on the same US stage. Consistent with our heritage, we’ll leave that to the plethora of media outlets and journalists for whom that is their only content and stick to tracking and commenting on the industry of golf which gives us a broader (and, ironically, usually more comical) palette of colors from which to paint.
Contributing Editor Stuart Lindsay headlines this month with a preview of the ’23 golf consumer base profile and changes which we customize for golf based on the National Sporting Goods Association survey as our long-term partner researcher. Much like every golf shot, which makes someone happy, some of the shifts among ages, income, gender and ethnicity suggest that challenges lie ahead in either building from our current plateau of recent success or maintaining this level of health beyond the next 1-2 years. Check out the article to get his perspective and the most-likely-suspects for near-future “speedbumps.”
Publisher Jim K. is supporting cast with his (reserved) mea culpa on finding best applied practices for AI in golf. In a friendly challenge to his millennial son, he poses a Pellucid process challenge that AI should be able to address and together they run it through the AI mill to see how and if AI can perform this task accurately, faster and easier. To Jim’s surprise, AI met the challenge and he outlines what they learned along the way (it wasn’t stupid simple or intuitive) and, importantly, how much improvement and efficiency was gained compared to manual labor (Jim’s approach for years 1-10 of this annual process) and code-based processing (the current standard, faster but not 100% accurate). It doesn’t prove universal application, speed and ease or a plethora of golf operations challenges but it does strongly suggest that there are real golf business applications on the horizon.
See below for the headlines to each of our recurring sections from the regional April weather impact map (steady-as-she-goes) to Market Focus (Lousiville KY, host of this weekend’s tournament). We’ve already compiled the April operations performance scorecard “preview”, courtesy of our Golf Market Research Center early-responders. It suggests that Golf Revenue and Rounds will slightly outperform the neutral weather result which would be a solid performance for the season-opening month. If you want to know those numbers on a regular basis, you can either participate in GMRC (course operators) or sign up for a Publications Membership (everyone else
INDUSTRY MACROS
2 US & golf economy; flashing early warning signs?
By Stuart Lindsay
TECHNOLOGY APPLICATIONS
6 AI golf business application challenge: Classify 14K golf courses 210 unique ways
By Jim Koppenhaver
COMINGS & GOINGS
10 “Shallow” activity skews to Private and higher end properties
WEATHER IMPACT
12 April’s a yawner with GPH +1%, Year-to-Date still up at +4%
BY-THE-NUMBERS
14 Mar Utilization declines 4 pts (rounds up, weather up more), Year-to-Date now neutral at -1 pt
MARKET FOCUS
16 PGA Championship host city Louisville KY, could use more, affordable “on-ramps” for golf
If you know of associates who would benefit from the topics and insights covered in this issue, feel free to forward this email and encourage them to register on the Pellucid website (http://www.pellucidcorp.com/news/elist) to join the discussion and healthy debate.
We also continue to spread the word on Pellucid’s next-generation golf course database. The Internet Golf Database (IGDB), provided by Apparation LLC, is the industry’s most complete, accurate, accessible and useful golf industry directory. IGDB, along with Pellucid’s proprietary extensions, powers Pellucid’s Golf Local Market Analyzer, the Top 25 US Golf Markets Scorecard and the GMRC. For more information on high-value IGDB subscriptions options, contact Apparation at mike.dickoff@apparationllc.com.
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