By James Colgan SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC NEWS) – Golf is one of the world’s oldest sports. The first official golf course, Musselburgh Links, opened on the coastline of Scotland in the mid-1700s, but the game can be traced all the way back to the fields of the Scottish countryside as early as the 1400s. Yet many within the sport are worried that more than half a millennium later, the historic sport’s future is decaying.
The concerns began when a few weeks ago, the World Golf Foundation (WGF), released its yearly report on the state of golf. The first findings listed in the WGF’s report were mostly positive. The overall number of players has remained flat from 2016 at 23.1 million, leveling off after five consecutive years of slumping numbers. Plus, the number of new players had spiked to an all-time high of 2.5 million.
But buried deep in the report was the statistic that most golf experts and players feared seeing most. The number of young players, specifically those under the age of 18, continued its precipitous decline. With 2018’s number, the number of “young golfers” dipped 30 percent from 2015.
“The problem isn’t getting people to play—if you look at the numbers, year over year, rounds played is up,” said Tim Oppedisano, Assistant Club Professional at Drumlins Golf Club in Syracuse. “The problem is getting younger people to show up. They just don’t like they used to, and it’s really hurting the industry.”
In recent years, the PGA TOUR has ramped up its efforts to better succeed among younger demographics through sponsored organizations like The First Tee and the PGA Junior League. Both organizations target children and diverse groups to grow the popularity of the game.
For Oppedisano, the organizations do plenty to help, but they don’t go far enough. “This definitely helps, but really want we want to be able to do is get some younger groups interested,” Oppedisano said. “Even juniors, the eight to ten, the five to eight-year-olds.”
And, as Oppedisano says, growing the game exists beyond just organizations, it has to come from players as well.
“You’re gonna need to get your younger superstars a little more approachable, a little more impressive to recreate this the way that he did,” he said.
