Focusing on Golf’s “Sophomores”: How do we avoid “slump”?
Post-COVID, it’s a documented fact (one of the few things on which Pellucid and NGF agree) that 1) we’ve benefitted from a surge in first-time golfers (we call “rookies”, they call “beginners”) and 2) those first-time golfers are more demographically diverse than the legacy golfer base. In other words, more females, more non-white, younger but, interestingly, not much different in leaning toward higher income. For the ’24 golf consumer survey, fielded in Jan-Feb ’25 and being compiled as we speak for our analysis and reporting, we asked our research partner, the National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA), to include a couple questions which will allow us to put the sophomore golfers under a magnifying glass to understand their behavior in critical Year 2.
While we won’t have the answers for another 30-45 days (the May OtR is traditionally the Golf National Consumer Franchise issue), I’m going to outline what we’re looking for, what I think we’re going to find and what the upside/downside is of different outcomes (i.e. why it matters):
- What is our retention rate among Beginners to continue play into a sophomore year and how does that compare to overall golfer retention?
- Do the sophomores play at a higher/same/lower frequency in Yr 2 than their rookie season?
- Does the demographic profile of the sophomores look more like our new crop of rookies (i.e. more demographically diverse) or do we retain golfers who look more like the veterans in Yr 2?
The reason this matters is, as I’ve repeatedly said over the years, the more golfers who “hang out” on the lower rungs of the involvement ladder (I’ve suggested semi-arbitrarily that this is <5 rounds/yr, not factoring in season length etc.) the more exposed we are to them dropping the sport and becoming either formers (never play again) or lapseds (pop in and out of golf over a period of years and are an unreliable source of rounds, revenue, equipment spend etc.). Getting a new golfer through the sophomore season and accelerating their frequency is both a golden and one-time opportunity for this group annually. The lone exception might be this 65+ year old golfer who’s trying to establish a small business in the industry and periodically drops to <5 rds/yr; he’s not going anywhere (other than the needed lesson tee) despite wild annual swings in his frequency (ha, ha).
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