Capitalizing on market gains

to Dick Stephens, CEO of the show’s organizer Varsity Communications.

For many upper-income investors who bore scars from the Great Recession, golf’s income hurdle has been lowered in the past few years by a surging stock market. And a crop of young talent on the PGA Tour has grabbed the attention of many, with Connecticut getting last July a front-row seat to the excitement the game can generate after Jordan Spieth holed out from a TPC River Highlands bunker to win the 2017 Travelers Championship in Cromwell in dramatic fashion.

With Woods challenging again this year on a few PGA Tour events early on the 2018 circuit, ratings are up on CBS, NBC and the Golf Channel subsidiary of NBC Sports based in Stamford.

For southwestern Connecticut golf clubs, the most important upward trend line has been in the stock market. Several have capitalized to hit up members for new

assessments to fund improvements, whether to clubhouses, fairways and greens, or other amenities such as pools and tennis courts. For a dozen local golf clubs whose 2016 annual reports have been posted by the Internal Revenue Service, capital assessments and other one-time charges were up nearly 5 percent from 2015 to $930,000 on average.

In Norwalk, the private Shorehaven Golf Club spent the past few years overhauling

its clubhouse and other facilities, with the club’s manager Bryan Dwyer having cited member recruitment as a major factor for the decision.

While collections for membership dues were also up, by 1.4 percent, initiation fees were off 3 percent in 2016, with only one in three clubs managing an increase. One outlier was the Country Club of Fairfield, which boosted initiation fees three straight years through 2016.

The greater a household’s income, the higher the percentages of golf

participation, as the NGF survey shows year in and year out. But lifestyle decisions also have come increasingly into play in the past decade. Experts have blamed declines in golf participation in part on the time required for a round of golf that can consume an entire morning or afternoon, as well as the encroachment of digital pastimes that have some youngsters more interested in handling a game controller than a putter.

Across town from Shorehaven in Norwalk, the Oak Hills Park Golf Course has

spent the past few years in its own improvement program, at an investment of $1.6 million, even as rounds played dropped 12 percent for the 12-month period ending in July. The public course’s governing authority has taken other steps to increase appeal, from acquiring “Golfboard” devices reminiscent of Segway scooters, to creating variable greens fees to draw additional golfers in the early morning hours or near dusk.

Just west of Danbury in Westchester County, N.Y., the North Salem Golf Club is fresh off $4 million in its own renovations that among other new wrinkles created a children’s center with structured activities, to include hunts on the course.

“This is how it is evolving, into something very different from Dad going out for the day to shoot a round of golf,” said Tim O’Malley, communications director for North Salem Golf Club. “Now it is, ‘we are going to meet him there and hang out for the afternoon.’”