Reputation management: golf's answer to participation woes

I began playing golf as a young child, surrounded by family of avid golfers, many with established tournament records and club championships under their belt. My grandparents’ home is filled with trophies and memorabilia from golf excursions near and far. My grandmother even won a tournament hosted by the King of Morocco in the 1980s—for my family, golf is more than a pastime, it’s a way of life. ❧ Growing up, every year when my mom competed in the local women’s golf championship, I would make a her a daily good luck gift; it was our own little tradition, and I dreamed of one day accomplishing what she had on a golf course. Much to my dismay, I have yet to master the game to the same level, but my love for the sport still runs strong and I attribute my connection with golf to playing on my high school golf team. ❧ For me, and for most of my team, golf wasn’t new to us. Our parents played, and we grew up in a town with a nice, private country club, so I had never really thought about what the sport does for the player—I was too far in the thick of it. But what I learned from my high school team was that golf has a way of teaching people something profound about themselves, and I saw this most in the young women playing on teams from nearby cities with much lower socioeconomic means. These girls may never have been on a course or swung a club before, and most of them probably didn’t continue to play after their high school years, but the change I saw in the girls I competed against for four years was inspiring, and it has always stuck with me. ❧ In recent years, much of the media attention on golf is focused on its decreased participation, it being perceived as an “old white guy’s sport” and the industry’s dim future. Most emphasize the lack of participation from Millennials, but women and minorities are often mentioned as well. ❧ I hate to hear this, as I am a golfer and I love the sport, but most of all it always leaves me thinking about those girls I competed against in high school and what a shame it would have been if they hadn’t taken the opportunity to learn to play. They comprise all three of the audiences with lower participation in the sport, and if it weren’t for their high school introducing them to the game. ❧ What I hope to accomplish with this thesis is to determine the best ways the field of communications can be used to help solve golf’s participation problem, in part to help the golf industry address an identified issue and also to encourage change that could make the sport more widely appealing to new audiences that would benefit from what the game has to offer.