The Pellucid Perspective - December 2022 - 7

my prognostication of a giveback.
The chart at right outlines what
the arc of rounds is likely to look like
after we get the December results.
At
first glance it looks like a
giveback of rounds of about half the
'21 vs. '20 increment (that would be
506.5M rounds for the precision
freaks out there) which was, interestingly,
my call for '21 vs. '20. So,
an argument I could make would be
" I was just a year early. " Let's pause
for a moment though and recognize
that this " giveback " of ~11M rounds
compared to '21 would still represent
a 14M round increase and a 71M
increase over the '19 pre-COVID
baseline (can you say " wow! " ?). Another
achievement in the '22 result is
that we'll manage to stay above the half-a-billion mark for a
2nd consecutive year which hasn't happened since the '00 and
'01 period (that was also the early years of facility-based rounds
reporting so I'm still calling those two years' numbers suspect).
Back to the narrative however of whether this decline represents
a drop in demand and loss of interest from our veterans as well
as rookies, I'm sure that by now most of you have at least thought
about the question, " Wait, aren't you the weather-adjusted performance
guys; what does that say about the rounds decline? "
Glad you asked; yes, we are those guys and it does tell a different
story than the general population chose golf 11M fewer times
in '22 vs. '21.
Those who follow all of Pellucid's monthly releases will recall
recently seeing the November Weather Impact analysis summary
which outlined an abysmal November (-19% for the month)
which piled on a subpar weather year at the national level with
Capacity Rounds being off ~6% YtD. This creates a situation
where rounds are declining but not as much as weather which our
Pellucid veterans will know can only mean one thing: % Utilization
must be going up. See chart below for the affirmation of that
basic and immutable math.
Our current calculations suggest that Utilization will end the
year " up " by just over a point which, while a deceleration vs. the
meteoric pace of increase in '20 and the healthy gain on top of
that in '21, is still an up. It would also represent the highest recorded
annual level since we introduced quantifiable weather-impact
and the Utilization metric over 15 years ago. The key point
though is that it's a divergent indicator from what the roundsonly
watchers in the industry will take away as the '22 trend. The
rounds-only headline is " We lost 11M rounds, the party's over,
the renaissance of heightened interest in golf is over. "
The correct story however is interest in golf and demand
to play, given playable conditions, actually remained stable or
improved slightly. When Stuart and I sat down to figure out
how to measure weather impact (from facility to national level)
back in '05, this is exactly the type scenario we were trying to
get right.
Unfortunately, for most
of the years between then and now
we've been on what I call the wrong
side of weather-adjusted truth.
In
most previous situations we've been
the ones explaining that the results
weren't as good as they appeared
on the surface after factoring out
weather (i.e. many situations where
Utilization was declining;
either
when rounds increased (but not as
much as weather favorability) or
they decreased (more than the unfavorable
weather decline). For those
efforts we were labeled " contrarians " ,
" cynics " and a bunch of other words
starting with the letter " c. " If we
truly were those things, we would've
buried this story and taken up with
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7
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The Pellucid Perspective - December 2022

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