Good morning and welcome back. I trust you all enjoyed a relaxing Fourth of July weekend, and with any luck played a few rounds as well.

This week’s edition will be slightly abridged. Enclosed, you’ll find a short essay on the role of par three courses in the future of the game, followed by a mid-summer American-themed buyer’s guide for those readers inclined to improve their style.

Recurring segments “3 things I know I know”, “Gear Shelf”, “Golf Digest Revisited”, and others will return next week.

See you at the bottom.

-BTG

The key to sustainable growth doesn’t lie in more inclusivity. It lies in building a proper education funnel, starting with the newest players. According to the USGA, three million net new players walked onto a golf course for the first time last year.

That staggering number doesn’t even include the patrons of places like Five Iron, TopGolf, or any of the other pseudo-golf onboarding ramps.

The USGA is, undoubtedly, jumping for joy at these numbers. Because growth is good, right? The little graph on their annual investor deck is pointing up and to the right. The leadership is beaming…

When I dig a little deeper and see the downstream impact of these net new players, I see a central infrastructure that is beginning to crumble.

Public golf is unplayable, unless of course you enjoy loud music, untucked shirts, and six hour rounds. Many private clubs have been forced to raise initiations into the millions of dollars to keep up with competing clubs while narrowing the pool of potential members to maintain exclusivity.

It's a barbell: pay up for access on one end, six-hour munis on the other, and nothing left in the middle. The middle ground used to be where the majority of people learned to play. The local muni with friendly staff and playing companions who understood the foundational etiquette of the game no longer exists. You can either pay up for access, or be relinquished to what public golf has become.

On to the issue at hand - how to get new players up to speed efficiently. How can we get them from watching Instagram reels on their couch to playing eighteen holes in four hours? It’s a sizable gap.

The answer lies somewhere between full eighteen hole golf courses and indoor simulators, which leads me to: par three courses.

A nine hole par three track is the perfect halfway house for player development. New players can learn fundamental etiquette like pitch mark repair, bunker maintenance, and general pace of play basics while actually playing golf holes.

It’s much quicker than eighteen holes, and far more cost-efficient for owner/operators. I see places like the Park and Cobbs Creek as excellent versions of onboarding venues with viable par three courses for newer players.

It’s as close to a full encapsulation of a round of golf as we have, and it’s a quick way to teach etiquette to kids, especially around the greens where it really matters.

Follow the blueprint Cobbs Creek and The Park have started. If you aren’t familiar, these are municipal facilities where the community has bought into the larger message of golf as connective tissue.

If you are a parent and want to get your kid introduced to the game, hitting balls on the range is only a single piece of the puzzle. The more frequently you can get kids outside and playing actual holes, the better. The situations which make for teaching moments will be bountiful compared to hitting balls into a screen.

I’m not sure why we don’t see more par three courses in the country, but they make for an excellent middle ground when first learning the game.