Scots alarmed by drop in membership numbers
GOLF clubs worldwide are experiencing challenges and even the Home of Golf – Scotland – is feeling the pain.
According to a report in The Scotsman this week, around 50,000 golfers have given up their membership at a Scottish club in the last ten years.
“You have to confront the brutal facts if you want to change your performance,” Stewart Darling, a non-executive director of Scottish Golf, told country’s first national conference in Edinburgh late last year.
“The golf landscape is challenging. For the last ten years, membership has been declining. We have been losing roughly 5,000 full members every year.“
According to Darling, the average number of members at a Scottish club in 2017 was 302 and they paid an average fee of £478.
“In five years’ time, he is predicting a 15 percent decline in membership and, as a consequence, that annual fee will have to go up, accounting for inflation at 2.5 percent, 34 percent,” Martin Dempster reported.
“Fast forward ten years and it could be 84 percent higher.”
Irish golf faces similar challenges with the key difference that the Confederation of Golf in Ireland has been working actively with clubs to help them create strategies to modernise their businesses and make golf club membership attractive to families.
“We have to work to get golf up to date and make it a sport people want to play and, at the same time, join golf clubs,” Darling said on the theme of getting more women and girls into golf.