Can We Coach Our Way to Retention of the "Covid Newbies"?
Reprinted from Proponent Group's members'-only news page. Originally published on September 30, 2020.
How to retain the wave of new golfers appearing this summer is a question on everyone’s mind. The National Golf Foundation’s CEO, Joe Beditz, wrote an open letter stating that the industry has a long history of failing to keep newcomers who give the sport a try. “Nothing changes if nothing changes,” Beditz warned, as an inspiration to all stakeholders. “The ability to retain customers has been golf’s Achilles heel for some time now,” he pointed out. “In the past five years alone we’ve ‘welcomed’ more than 12 million people, and yet our ‘sea level’ has risen by only 200,000 players, give or take—it’s almost inexplicable.”
Proponent Group asked some of our own analytically-minded members and industry friends to look at what’s going on and spotlight the strategies and approaches that could make the retention story this time around a successful one.
Several years ago, a prophetic article appeared in Golf Business magazine, titled, “If A New Tiger Woods Came Along, Would Golf Be Ready?” The premise was that participation didn’t truly grow despite the worldwide fascination with how Woods played the game and the grand figure he cut on the global scene. Those interviewed made note of the relatively healthy state of the business even before Tiger, all the way down to public golfers sleeping in parking lots to secure tee times at the top public facilities. Raw beginners would only clog up the fairways and upset these regulars, so we greeted them with comments about their shorts not being the right length, and other quibbles.
Industry people these days seem to look back on that response and shake their heads. “We’re not like that now” is the consensus opinion, and the main reason is that we need the revenue now in ways we didn’t 20 years ago. Furthermore, society’s general loosening of the rules and standards for public behavior have carried golf along. So, on a cultural level, golf too has become more relaxed. When Tiger first appeared there was a ban on cell phones at many a club. Now everywhere one looks there are looser dress codes, no more rules against rangefinders and music, even experiments like oversized cups and footgolf layouts have shown a general relaxation of the game’s old uptight ways.
Architecturally, the brutal, high-Slope conditions of the 1990s and 2000s have been softened and a return to features like broad drive zones have helped undo the excesses of the prior period. Tee it Forward and other ideas for reducing the punishment factor have gained popularity.
Longtime top-tier coach Bill Davis has a positive take about the percentage of newbies our industry can retain as active golfers—he puts it at 75 percent among those who get into teaching programs with enlightened instructors, and about 50 percent among those who simply show up at the local public course and try to get in the swing of things.
“The first indicator for me is how well the coaches I know have hung on to the new golfers who came to them in April and May,” says Davis, who’s based at semi-private Abacoa Golf Club in Jupiter, Fla. “As we got into August and September those people were still showing up, because a skilled coach in this day and age doesn’t need as much time as teachers needed 10 years ago, in order to make significant early progress.” The full-book instructors who are talking about their banner year in 2020 “are causing less-busy teachers to seek advice on what they’re doing wrong,” Bill adds.
One related point: In the old Tiger-Boom-That-Wasn’t, retention tactics involving email capture and outreach by social media weren’t part of the teacher’s toolbox, according to Davis. Meanwhile, he believes, the grumpy rangers and starters from a generation back aren’t around anymore, to scare neophytes away. Instead they get greeted by smiles and offers of assistance with whatever they need to know.
In Connecticut, innovative instructor and collegiate golf coach Doug Holub is experiencing “the most incredible year ever to be a golf instructor,” as he describes it.
“I started to get more and more calls from people—many new, some from before—and realized something was really happening,” says Holub. “I did away with most of my discounts, I raised my rates, and the people just kept on coming.”
You have to teach differently under these circumstances, he believes, and yet many of the innovations this phenomenon requires are along the lines of changes he was already instituting. “There’s all the more reason now to follow the Will Robinsmodel—where the student makes a commitment and the coach explains what it will take, based on their goals, I guide their practice as much as I actually teach, and I make sure that it’s social and it’s fun.”
One piece of advice he and others are offering involves golf etiquette. Don’t teach someone new not to step in another player’s line. Where they stand while another player hits is about safety, not about being a stickler for exact protocol. Taking players out on the course as soon as possible is all-important, but don’t be surprised if the adult women beginners get out there and ask more questions about golf manners than about shotmaking or strategy.
“The most unpleasant etiquette lectures in golf are given to inexperienced women golfers by experienced women golfers,” says Holub. “The women you’re indoctrinating into golf will look to you for information that shields them from that disapproval.”
Question: Have you set goals for how many of your newcomers you can mold into committed golfers—who will still be around when Covid-19 is a minor nuisance instead of the immense disruption to society and the economy that it’s been so far?
It’s a question that will get answered, a couple of years from now, in the form of a percentage. Some portion between 0 and 100 percent will still be with us at that point. Cathy Harbin, a course-owning industry veteran who has been executive director of Golf 20/20—and later a high-ranking ClubCorp executive—offered her opinion by sticking a pin in the 33 percent level.
“The industry should start with the idea of retaining one-third of these new people—that should be our baseline expectation,” says Harbin. “The big win would be keeping somewhere near 50 percent. And if we can’t do any better than 20 to 25 percent, that would be golf’s proverbial ‘leaky bucket’ all over again.” Having tackled the question of how-many, Harbin took up the question of how.
“Picture we’re in 2022 and we’ve got the outcome we were hoping for,” she says. “There are two golfer attitudes, in my opinion, that will have driven it. The first is, ‘Becoming a golfer was not as much about ability as I thought it would be.’ The second is, ‘I didn’t figure that socializing at the golf course would take the place of meeting my friends at the pub, but it did.’”
At Harbin’s course in Paris, Tex., a daily-fee facility called Pine Ridge, there are customers who arrived for the first time this spring and are already showing up habitually, sometimes just for after-work drinks on the patio. “When heading for our golf course becomes second-nature for these folks, that’s a big win,” she says.
Her comment about the new convert to golf saying “it wasn’t so much about ability” is interwoven with strategically smart instruction programming. “For this customer, who is leaving coronavirus behind as they make their way into golf, the ideal experience is socializing-meets-coaching,” she believes. “If they keep hearing one promise, that ‘we’re going to have fun and we’re going to get better’, and the promise gets kept, we’ve done our jobs. We’ve provided an escape from the misery of the pandemic, which people won’t forget.”
Coaching and teaching adult beginners is always enhanced by the social element, but in this strange circumstance it’s all the more important. Doug Holub spoke to that in part one of this article, saying etiquette lessons should be minimal. He likewise believes that, in the teaching process itself, this is no time to be a stickler.
“The theme of what I say to these new people about grip, stance and alignment is preference,” Holub comments. “Your baseball grip is fine, I’ll tell them. Even a split grip might be okay. I’m trying to get a flowing swing motion to happen with the student upright, then have them retain that motion after they bend over. If that happens, and we can get the golf ball in the way, there’s contact, the ball gets airborne, and everyone’s happy.”
These are interesting times for anyone involved in player development, but for Ryan Dailey and Matt Reagan of Operation 36 it’s all the more so. Day one of a new golfer’s experience with Op36 will feature a 9-hole round in which the (achievable) goal is to shoot 36—the player starts as close to the hole as necessary to make that a likelihood, then gradually moves back. It’s the only player development platform that doesn’t begin with “getting ready” to play golf, it begins with playing golf, while holing out every time and writing down a 9-hole score. It’s also the only platform with a direct, intentional focus on “teaching people how to pay a green fee to play a round of golf,” Reagan is fond of saying.
If you haven’t played before, and you participate faithfully in the Op36 program—practice, instruction and 9-hole rounds—you’ll be at it a long time before you resemble even a 25- to 30-handicap golfer, according to the company’s meticulously maintained hard data. The classic golf-quitter’s comment that the game “is too hard” actually gets borne out by what Dailey and Reagan have learned over the years, therefore player-dev that’s going to work has to stretch out the yardage at a slow and careful pace. While that’s happening there is plenty of fun to be had, along with minimal frustration and the very powerful true-golf feeling of never picking up, always holing out, always recording a score, then slowly watching scores go down as your personal golf course stretches out.
“Development of skills and competence that leads to achievement of pre-set goals is hard-wired into the human brain and the emotional system,” says Reagan, as he describes a golf journey akin to learning piano, aikido or a foreign language. The apparent lesson of Op36 is that you can’t learn golf quickly, but you can learn fairly soon that the program you’ve entered will turn you into a golfer if you stick with it.
There’s interesting news coming out of Reagan and Dailey’s company, of notable interest to coaches. Operation 36 announced that its signature Online Coach Academy would be available at no cost to all golf professionals, as well as to PGA Golf Management students. The Coach Academy has previously been available only to registered, fee-paying Operation 36 Program locations.
“We want to help all professionals make a transition to Developmental Golf Programming, as we’ve designed and built it,” says Reagan. “That starts with education, which is is why we’re making select education courses live for anyone.”
The process of creating a free Op 36 Academy Account begins by visiting this web page, for information and account setup.
Years ago Cathy Harbin was asked about internal strategizing at ClubCorp around golf instruction and player development. She responded by noting that within the ClubCorp network there were excellent teachers whose good work was appreciated and singled out for praise, with one missing element.
“I would hear kudos of all kinds about the teachers—except for one,” Harbin recalled. “I never heard someone say that Teacher XYZ was great at bringing new people into the game and getting them to stay. That isn’t a prestigious coaching achievement, within our industry—at least not yet.”
In the Covid era, and especially when the dust settles post-Covid, that observation about the industry may very well have changed, in a significant and highly welcome fashion.
-Lorin Anderson