NGF: Golfer Inventory Reduction Much Smaller In '11

The annual findings of the National Golf Foundation suggest golf's declining numbers have bottomed out, with 25.7 million Americans playing at least one round in 2011 and

The good news is that the year-over-year reduction of 400K golfers is smaller than what we’ve seen in the past three years of the great recession. For reference, we lost one million golfers from 2009 to 2010 and 1.5 million between 2008 and 2009. We suspect this reduced net outflow is yet another sign that we are bouncing along the bottom of the trough and on the verge of a modest recovery.  Based on past NGF research, this pattern would be similar to how golf rebounded when the country emerged from previous recessions.