Why Commities Are Ruining Golf

Most golf clubs are run by committees. Most committees are made up of volunteers with no formal training in governance, marketing, or business management, who rotate out every one to three years. That structure was fine when clubs were social institutions competing with nothing but the club down the road. It's a serious liability now that clubs are competing with pay-and-play courses, golf simulators, subscription models, and every other business fighting for the same disposable income and free time.

The problem isn't that committees are made up of bad people. It's that the structure itself is built for consensus and caution, not speed or return on investment, and marketing is usually the first thing that gets stuck in that gap.

The governance model wasn't built for speed

Across roughly 3,000 private clubs in the US alone, an estimated 33,000 people serve as volunteer club directors, an average of 11 per club, the vast majority with no prior governance training or understanding of the club business model. Because committee terms cycle quickly, best practice rarely has time to take hold before the people who learned it move on.

The knock-on effect is decision-making speed. A 2026 governance study across Australian golf, surveying over 1,100 leaders at more than 600 clubs, found persistent structural problems despite clubs collectively managing close to A$900 million in revenue. One case in the same report is worth noting directly: Mandurah Country Club moved from a traditional committee structure to a streamlined six-person board with specialist sub-committees, and within two years had faster decision-making, clearer accountability, and measurably stronger performance. The lesson isn't "get rid of committees" it's that decision-making speed and clarity of ownership are directly tied to results, and most clubs have neither.

For marketing specifically, this plays out in a predictable way: a campaign, rebrand, or content plan needs sign-off from a committee that meets quarterly, has no delegated authority to approve spend on its own, and includes members who are evaluating the proposal on instinct rather than data. By the time it's approved, the opportunity, a seasonal promotion, a trend, a competitor's gap, has usually passed.

Marketing gets treated as optional, not infrastructure

This is the bigger issue. Course maintenance, insurance, and staffing are treated as fixed costs. Marketing is treated as a discretionary line that gets cut first when a budget needs trimming and questioned hardest when it doesn't produce an immediate, easily attributed result.

That's a measurement problem as much as a mindset problem. Committees tend to debate marketing channels based on personal preference rather than data, because most clubs don't track the numbers that would settle the argument, customer acquisition cost, conversion from enquiry to booking or membership, retention rate by channel. Without that baseline, every marketing conversation defaults to opinion, and opinion loses to "let's not spend the money this year."

The clubs getting it right are the ones treating digital marketing as normal operating spend rather than a gamble. Enfield Golf Club is one of the more concrete examples: after handing its social media strategy to a specialist agency rather than running it in-house on an ad hoc basis, the club reported the budget was used to its full potential and delivered a strong return, the difference being a consistent, professionally run campaign instead of sporadic posts. That's a small case study, but it reflects a broader pattern in the data: targeted, well-managed digital campaigns consistently outperform the scattergun approach most clubs default to.

The cost of standing still

The membership numbers make the stakes clear. UK club membership has fallen by roughly 150,000 over the past decade, and under-35 memberships dropped 12% in a single year between 2023 and 2024, with 68% of younger golfers citing high upfront costs as the main barrier to joining. At the same time, separate industry research shows 74% of golfers aged 18–34 plan to buy a membership or season pass, and over a third of Gen Z and millennial golfers are actively considering switching from pay-per-round to membership as a hedge against rising costs.

Read together, those numbers don't describe a sport in decline, they describe a sport where demand exists but isn't being converted, largely because clubs aren't communicating value to the people who'd actually respond to it. Younger golfers are shown up on generic websites and static noticeboards, when the data says they're already primed to commit if the offer and the messaging meet them where they are: online, mobile, and immediate.

Meanwhile golfer sentiment on communication is already strained, nearly a third of members whose fees increased in 2025 said their club never explained why. Clubs that are quiet on marketing are usually quiet on communication generally, and members notice both.

What actually works

The clubs pulling ahead share a few traits, and none of them are complicated:

• Delegated authority. Marketing decisions sit with a manager or a small, accountable group — not a full committee vote every time a campaign needs sign-off.

• A shared definition of return. Not likes or impressions, but membership conversions, bookings, and retention, tracked consistently enough that decisions are made on data rather than instinct.

• Marketing budgeted like course maintenance — as a fixed, ongoing cost with an expected outcome, not a discretionary spend that gets cut when the year's tight.

None of this requires abolishing committees. It requires clubs to be honest about what committees are good at — oversight, representing member interests, long-term strategy — and what they're not: fast, specialist decisions on campaigns, channels, and budget allocation that need to move at the pace of the market, not the pace of a quarterly meeting.

Clubs that make that adjustment tend to stop asking whether marketing is worth the spend, and start asking why it took them so long to treat it like everything else that keeps the course running.

Sources: Bobby Jones Links Club Board Governance Best Practices Guide; Asian Golf Industry Federation, 2026 National Club Governance Report; Golf Business News; Golfshake, "Revealing the Health of Golf Club Membership in 2025"; GCMA membership strategy data; Lightspeed 2025 Golf Industry Report.