“Walking is now here to stay”

After years of New York Times story on golf’s decline it’s nice to see the enterprise acknowledging its resurgence. The latest is a super Bill Pennington piece filled with great stats about the resurgence of walking during the pandemic and now continuing after golf cart restrictions have been lifted.

“People discovered they liked walking and even when Covid rules were lifted this year and carts came back, people were like, ‘No, we’re going to keep walking,’” said Jerramy Hainline, the senior vice president of GolfNow, an online tee-time service with nearly four million registered golfers that provides technology to more than 9,000 golf courses. “Walking is now here to stay.”

If that remains true, it will bring new light to recent studies that have championed golf’s health benefits. In 2018, a consortium of public health experts, with help from several governing bodies including the World Golf Foundation, researched 342 previously published studies on the sport and linked playing golf with better strength and balance and a lower risk of heart disease. A 2008 Swedish study of 300,000 golfers found the death rate for golfers to be 40 percent lower than for other people of the same sex, age and socioeconomic status, which translated to a five-year increase in life expectancy. Golfers with lower handicaps were the healthiest, perhaps because they played more.

And the M’s are playing a huge part in the shift according to Pennington.

A survey of nearly 25,000 golfers released last month by KemperSports, which manages 120 golf facilities nationwide, discovered that players new to the game since last year’s pandemic were almost 33 percent girls or women, which is nearly 10 percent higher than the industry average. More than 26 percent of the new golfers were 18 to 34 years old, roughly four percent above the national average.

“We had been missing the Millennials and Gen Z demographic in golf,” Steven Skinner, the Kemper Sports chief executive officer, said. “But they’re into fitness and more willing to throw a bag on their back and walk. That’s been part of why they’ve really jumped into the game.”

This doesn’t bode well for the Shark Experience that was destined to break the governing body “cast iron” fist.