By Paul Le Fevre, Founding Editor, +21 Handicap
Issue 005 | Golf’s Biggest Barrier
The short version: golf isn’t elitist on purpose. It’s just structured entirely around the people who already know what they’re doing, and a nervous beginner holding up the group behind them is a real cost to the members who already pay for a good round. Nobody has to be unwelcoming for that to quietly push beginners out. That’s the fear nobody’s job is to fix.
I was 37, on the first tee of a well-known course, and I shanked it three times in a row. As I walked off, a better golfer, a member, the kind of person who’d clearly been playing since he was seven, turned to his mate and muttered that I should be going off the ladies’ tees.
Nobody else heard it. It didn’t matter. For the next year, I found ways to avoid that exact moment happening again. On plenty of first tees after that, I didn’t even hit my own ball. I’d drop one wherever my friend’s tee shot had landed, just so I never had to stand there again with people behind me, watching.
That’s not a story about a bad round. That’s a story about redesigning an entire year of golf around not being seen fail. Golf has never quite admitted that this is what it does to people.
Is cost really golf’s biggest barrier?
For a long time I believed the same thing everyone tells you: golf is expensive, and that’s why more people don’t play. Green fees, kit, membership. The whole apparatus of a sport that still, in places, wants a certain kind of person to feel at home in it. That’s a real barrier. It’s also the easy one to talk about, because it’s a pricing problem, not a structural one, and nobody has to examine how a course is actually built around its existing members to solve it.
It’s the number people quote because it’s the one that shows up in industry surveys of golfers. GolfNow’s research finds 43% of golfers who already play name cost as their main hesitation. But that’s people already in the game talking about affordability. Ask the people who never showed up at all, and the number that matters is different. In the National Golf Foundation’s own research on non-golfers, only about 36% say they’d feel comfortable around other golfers, and roughly half aren’t sure they’d feel welcome at a course in the first place. The people already playing worry about the bill. The people who never started worry about whether they’d belong.
Do you need your own clubs to start playing golf?
“They think golf is expensive,” says Natalie Goodall, a qualified PGA coach who works with those looking to improve their game. “Many assume they need to buy hundreds of pounds’ worth of equipment and join a golf club before they can even try the game.” Ask her what actually stops people booking a first lesson, and cost isn’t really the block, it’s not knowing where to start. Questions like whether you need your own clubs, or whether you can just turn up at a range, create enough uncertainty that plenty of people never take the first step at all.
What’s the real reason people avoid their first round?
What I’ve since learned, the hard way, on that first tee and every one after it for a year, is that the real answer is quieter than cost. It’s not “I can’t afford it.” It’s “I don’t want to be watched doing it badly in public, by people who look like they already belong.” Golf is one of the only sports where you fail in full view of strangers, slowly, for four hours, with no substitution, no timeout, nowhere to hide a bad day. Nobody built that fear on purpose. But nobody’s dismantled it either.
“Most new golfers I coach worry about how they are perceived by experienced golfers,” says Darren Timms, a PGA-qualified coach. “They worry about being too slow, holding everyone up or not being good enough. They don’t want to be put in situations where they don’t know what to do. There is definitely a stigma around new golfers vs experienced golfers and I’m sure that puts a lot of new potential players off.”
Why driving ranges solved a fear that golf courses never did
I used the range myself before I ever went near a course, the way most people do. It’s an easier place to fail. But it’s what I’ve noticed in other people since that says more. I know a few golfers who are genuinely good enough to play. They never book a round. Not because they can’t afford it, and not because they don’t want to. They stay at the range because they’re convinced that if they got on a course, they’d hold people up, and that the group behind them would notice, and mind. Their golf never fails in public because they’ve quietly arranged for it never to be seen at all.
That’s the same fear from a different angle. Driving ranges, simulator bars, Topgolf: places where you can be bad at golf and it doesn’t count, because nobody’s keeping score, nobody’s waiting on you, and the people next to you are there for the same reason you are. Those formats didn’t get more popular because they’re cheaper than a round at a private club. They got popular because they removed the audience. That’s the tell. The fear was never really about the game.
This is the gap I keep coming back to when I think about why I started Room 19 in the first place. Golf spent decades trying to lower the price of entry and largely succeeded: public courses, pay-and-play, cheaper kit than ever. It never lowered the price of being seen trying. Nobody wrote a headline about that, because it’s not a number you can put in a press release. It’s a feeling, and feelings don’t show up in participation reports until someone asks the right question.
So here’s the actual claim: golf didn’t get more expensive to be bad at. It just built its entire on-course experience around the people already good enough not to slow anyone down, and never had a reason to build anything for the person who isn’t. Most people who don’t play aren’t staying away because they can’t afford a set of irons. They’re staying away because they don’t want their first attempt to be a spectator sport, and no one’s job is to make sure it isn’t.
Your first tee is the story
If that’s familiar, if some version of my first tee is the reason your clubs are still in the garage, or the reason it took you until you were in your thirties to book that first lesson, you’re not the exception the data forgot. You’re most of the story.
I'd like to hear yours. Drop a comment and tell me about your first tee, the good, the bad, the moment you almost didn't go back. Someone reading this is deciding right now whether golf is for them. Your story might be the thing that gets them to turn up anyway.
With thanks to:
Natalie Goodall, PGA Coach at Parley Golf Centre, Bournemouth. Follow on Instagram.
Darren Timms, PGA Coach at Gravesend Golf Centre, Kent. Follow on Instagram.
Sources: Golfer hesitation data from GolfNow research on deterrents to play. Non-golfer comfort and belonging figures from the National Golf Foundation’s research on barriers among non-golfers.
I started Room 19 because I wanted golf writing that treated the game the way the culture magazines I actually read treat everything else, properly, not as tips, gear reviews and FOMO shots of golf courses. This is our first attempt at going longer than eight slides. If you want the next one first, subscribe below.
Paul is the founding editor of Room 19, a golf brand telling the untold stories of the game for people who found it through culture, not the clubhouse. He took up golf at 37. Find Room 19 Golf on Instagram and TikTok.