The Pellucid Perspective - April 2022 - 4

THE COVID EFFECT
In my opinion, the root of the beginner
retention challenge is that we haven't
built, over the past 20 years of
attempts, a scalable, reliable system for
onboarding our sport's rookies.
Through several projects we've completed in the first quarter
of this year, we've been able to document from multiple approaches
and sources that the beginner retention rate actually
is ~25% so I didn't just pull that number out of thin air if you're
wondering. So what we're experiencing currently is that COVID
effectively increased the fill rate at the top of our bucket
and the loss at the bottom is being constrained by the hole not
being any bigger. This points out two challenges going forward
that the industry needs to solve: beginner player development
and veteran golfer retention. Colleague Stuart Lindsay tackles
the latter issue in his article this month and we agreed I'd tackle
the beginner player development challenge.
In my opinion, the root of the beginner retention challenge
is that we haven't built, over the past 20 years of attempts, a scalable,
reliable system for onboarding our sport's rookies. Absent
that infrastructure, the vast majority of beginning golfers are
getting exposed to the game by just going out with friends and
family and whacking it around the course. Longtime Pellucid
followers know that I'm not a traditionalist in the sense of new
golfers needing to know the nuances of all the playing/scoring
rules, conforming equipment, collared shirts etc. On the other
hand, when I took up the game 40+ years ago, I recall that the
first couple months weren't particularly fun, not getting the ball
airborne etc. I went and got some instruction and the pro put
me on a better path for faster progress and more fun. It didn't
hurt that I was the athletic officer of the base at Kaneohe Bay
HI as my final stint on active duty in the Marine Corps and the
golf pro at the Kaneohe Clipper actually worked for me (ha,
ha). Given that most of our beginning golfers aren't going to
walk into that situation, we need a more repeatable, commercial-grade
onboarding program that can handle the volume of
beginners that COVID has provided.
Taking a quick trip down memory lane of just a sampling of
historical, unsuccessful programs:
*
City Blitz/LinkUp2Golf program (NGCOA) - This
rolled into 3 markets pre 2001and had a short, nonscalable
shelf life. This was one of two programs which
Pellucid analyzed and reported on in our presentation
at the inaugural Golf 20/20 gathering in November
2020
* Nike Golf Learning Centers - This was the other inprogress
program that we analyzed at Golf 20/20. This
was a joint effort between the nascent Nike Golf Division
and American Golf (two blasts from the past, eh?),
overseen by Dave Pillsbury (AmGolf at the time, not
to be confused with his later stint at Nike; NGLC was
long-buried by then). Dave commented as part of Golf
4 The Pellucid PersPecTive
20/20 that the program required 150-200 participating
courses to cover the overhead and burden and at least
break even. They folded it when it failed that mark
after year 2
*
Get Golf Ready - This was Golf 20/20's primary
branded effort during the 20-year search for successful
player development. It had the support of the PGA of
America and several components for success but lacked
a few critical elements (affordable rental component,
no intelligent/thoughtful success metrics and no independent
entity reporting & evaluation of results and
refinement recommendations)
*
Golf 2.0 - This was the PGA of America's solo sequel
to the Get Golf Ready golf associations' coalition effort.
I believe the thinking was that Get Golf Ready
failed due to trying to coordinate among golf's " 5 families "
so, by making it single-threaded by the PGA of
America, it would remove that obstacle and succeed. It
didn't (succeed).
It seemed that the common threads in these failures to build
scalable programs was a) they were coalitions of various stakeholders
with different (competing?) outcome interests and b)
they were industry association-led efforts vs. either private enterprise
or grassroots programs coming out of individual markets/facilities
by trial-and-error. In a sign that the industry is at
least " failing forward " , two of the latest/current crop of player
development are non-association efforts:
*
Op36 - Like Pellucid, these guys have been at this
and trying/reformulating to get a successful business
model for over a decade but they've gotten several
elements right based on the growth in participants,
facilities and limited metrics they've shared with us in
the past 2 years. According to their website, they've
had 75K participants spread across 600 facilities and
1,500 PGA Member coaches in their network. Two
keys here are they focus on a structured " from-thegreen
backwards " playing-focused curriculum and their
technology and the underlying app allow them to stay
connected to their graduates and track key metrics
like their frequency, course selection (do they favor
the " home course " or play a rotation after learning?)
and skill improvement (via scores entered in the app).
We think they could do more to take the quantifiable
metrics of trips and spending back to " home course "
benefit (i.e. tag the Op36 participants in the course's
PoS database which would give the course " passive "
April 2022
The Pellucid Perspective - April 2022

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