Perhaps the first law of holes is slowly helping bring the golf industry in Colorado into equilibrium.
The industry found itself in a hole and it simply stopped digging.
With the number of golfers in the U.S. having dropped significantly over the last decade, then the economy tanking starting in 2007 or ’08, the market response has been a notable net loss in the number of courses in Colorado — and nationally, too. While more than a handful of courses have closed in the state over the last five or six years, no new ones have opened and few are in the works. This after no year passing between 1980 and 2009 in which at least one new Colorado course — and usually more — opened for business.
Considering the human toll, it’s hard to watch courses close. But sometimes such closures contribute to the health of several other facilities.
Whatever the case, the Colorado golf industry appears to be stabilizing after several rough years. The recently released Colorado Public Golf Course Rounds and Revenue Survey seems to point in that direction.
The results from 2014 were distributed and discussed last week at the Public Golf Operators Meeting, held in conjunction with the G4 Summit at the Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs.
After the number of rounds played at public courses dipped, on average, most of the previous five years, 2014 was a small step in the opposite direction.
With more than 70 Colorado courses reporting data — par-3 facilities included — both rounds and revenue increased slightly compared to 2013.
For the 68 courses that provided numbers for both 2013 and ’14, 18-hole-equivalent rounds increased by 3.6 percent, on average, last year compared to ’13. And green fee revenue per 18-hole round inched up 1.9 percent over the same period. With par-3 and executive courses included, the average green fee revenue per 18-hole round went from $27.99 in 2013 to $28.53 in 2014.
Though Colorado public course operators share their statistics on the condition that individual facilities aren’t named publicly, trends and averages can be reported.
Of course, comparing one year to the next isn’t an exact apples-to-apples situation. The weather always varies, and in the case of 2013 and ’14, the September 2013 floods had an effect on numbers in 2013 and ’14 at some facilities.
Noting the results of the recently released survey, CGA executive director Ed Mate said, “The one word I would say is ‘flat’ — or, more optimistically, ‘stable’, ‘solid’. The one thing I looked at is 2014 compared to the five-year average — which is better because things tend to average out over five years — and it’s (largely) flat. The good news is, we’re not going in the wrong direction, and if the good weather is there, people will come play.”
Colorado PGA executive director Eddie Ainsworth noted that year-to-year fluctuations are often weather-based, but he likewise took some heart in things leveling off after several worrisome down years.
“We’ve stabilized,” he said. “We definitely saw a decline, but we’ve stabilized. The market is correcting itself.”
Ann Guiberson was hired as the CWGA’s executive director about 11 months ago, and she’s happy to hear things are on a bit of an upswing.
“It sounds positive for Colorado golf,” she said. “We’re heading in the right direction.”
According to PGA of America’s PerformanceTrak data, when accounting for weather, a total of 29 states in the country showed growth in rounds played per day open in 2014.
