Many Start, Few Continue

In “I Give Up! A Sport People Love to Quit,” the Wall Street Journal notes that the golf industry is looking for ways to attract and retain golfers. John Paul Newport, writing in the August 12, 2006 edition, comments on 6-hole courses, structured programs, and so forth.

The reason for this activity, of course, is money: if players quit, so do the cash registers. Each year, roughly 3 million people take up golf; and roughly 3 million leave golf.

Still, says Newport, golf has it pretty good compared with some other sports. (Yes, this is where the snowboarding connection comes in.)

One can easily get the impression, listening to the industry’s hand-wringing about the game’s lack of net growth, that retaining golfers is an urgent problem, almost of crisis proportion. But in fact golf’s retention rate for beginners — 50% overall after one year — is much better than that for tennis (20%) or skiing (15%).

The article doesn’t say whether that 15 percent number includes children and adults, or adults only. It also doesn’t mention whether “skiers” means only downhill skiers, or whether it includes snowboarders.

I suspect–and have no hard numbers on this–that more adults are more likely to start skiing than snowboarding, but that the retention rate is higher for snowboarding. More adults may be able to imagine themselves skiing than riding.