Too Close to the Numbers

Two calendars, one industry

If you run a golf course in Indiana, Ohio, or Michigan, you know what early November looks like. The last outing is in the books, the crew is getting ready to blow out the irrigation lines, and most of the shop talk is about what needs fixing before spring. 

Down south, it’s the opposite. Seasonal residents are heading back to Florida, Arizona, and Texas, and the busy part of the year is just getting going there. A University of Florida study estimated Florida’s temporary population at roughly 920,000 during the peak winter months, compared to about 170,000 in late summer. Michigan and Ohio ranked second and third behind New York as home states for those seasonal residents, which means some of the golfers who finished their year on a Midwest course this fall will be on a Florida tee sheet by Christmas. 

The national numbers show the same split. In January, about two-thirds of U.S. states are still in their golf offseason. Last December, winter weather dropped rounds 58% from the year before across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, while Texas and Georgia each gained 13%, according to NGF. It’s one industry running on two calendars. 

It has also been a busy few years on both. 2025 finished 1.2% ahead of 2024’s record total, making it the fourth record year in five. That’s a good problem to have, but it also means fewer slow weeks to step back and look at anything. 

Whichever calendar you’re on, at some point the year-end reports land on your desk. You look through rounds, revenue, labor, food and beverage, and outings, and for most owners and GMs, nothing really stands out. It was a busy year, and the numbers look about like you expected. 

That’s normal. You were there for all of it. You remember the wet stretch, the outing that was cancelled, and the week you lost two people on the grill. When you’ve lived every day of a season, the report at the end of it doesn’t tell you much you don’t already feel like you know. 

The trouble is that knowing what happened isn’t the same as seeing the patterns in it, and the patterns are usually what should be driving next year’s plan. 

Why close makes it harder

There’s nothing wrong with being close to your operation. That’s how a superintendent knows which green is going to struggle when it gets hot in August, and how a head pro knows who’s going to call about a tee time before the phone rings. You can’t get that from a spreadsheet. 

Being that close does make some things hard to notice, though. Most of what changes at a course changes slowly. Somebody skips a step on a busy weekend, it works out fine, and a year later that’s just how it’s done. A cost goes up a little each season, never enough to make anyone stop and ask about it, until it’s simply part of the budget. Labor is the big one. It typically runs 52% to 58% of a golf course’s total expenses, so a few extra hours a week on a schedule nobody has rebuilt in a couple of years adds up faster than most people expect. 

Weather makes the read even harder. Golf Datatech’s historical analysis, published in NGF’s monthly rounds reports, estimates that each additional inch of rain compared to the prior year cuts rounds by about 2.2%. In May 2025, Ohio had a month with well-above-average rain and well-below-average temperatures, and rounds fell almost 13% from the year before. A swing like that can hide a real problem in a good year or make a solid operation look like it’s slipping in a bad one. When weather explains so much, it’s easy to let it explain everything. 

Then there’s how people remember a season. Research by Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues found that people judge an experience mostly by its most intense moment and how it ended, and that how long it lasted barely factors in. In one well-known study, participants preferred to repeat 90 seconds of painfully cold water over 60 seconds of the same pain, because the longer trial ended just one degree warmer. A season works the same way. A strong fall makes a slow spring easy to forget, and a bad August can make the whole year feel worse than it was. 

None of that is anybody doing their job wrong. When you’re running a course, most of your attention goes to today. The tee sheet is full, there’s weather moving in, and somebody called off. Stepping back to look at the whole year rarely wins out over that, and during the season, it probably shouldn’t. 

Patterns hiding in plain sight

So what does a pattern actually look like at your course? Usually it’s something small that’s been happening all year, and nobody has had the time to line it up from one month to the next. 

Take the tee sheet. Most courses can tell you their busiest days without looking, and on a lot of reports, Saturday morning shows up as full. But “full” can mean two different things. Every tee time on the sheet can be booked while plenty of those groups went out with two or three players instead of four. A twosome at 8:10 and a threesome at 8:20 both count as booked, and both had open spots nobody sold. Some of those started as foursomes that came up a player short on the day, which the industry even has a name for: a short show. 

Whether that ever shows up depends on how your reports are built and what they’re meant to answer. If the weekly report counts tee times booked, Saturday looks sold out. If it counts players against available spots, that same morning can look noticeably less full. Both reports are accurate, but they answer different questions, and whichever one you look at every week is the one shaping your decisions. Monthly totals can blur it even more, since a month of rounds won’t tell you that Saturday mornings are packed while Saturday afternoons are going out half-empty. 

Those open spots matter to golfers, too. The single who calls on Wednesday for a Saturday morning time gets told you’re booked, when there were open spots in half a dozen groups. And that’s before counting the groups that never show up at all. Noteefy and Metolius Golf analyzed more than 10 million rounds across 500-plus courses and found that roughly 9% of tee times go unused because of no-shows, which works out to more than $150,000 a year in lost revenue for the average course. For the owner, that’s revenue that never shows up anywhere, not as a discount or a refund, just as an empty slot. 

Rain checks and comps are another one. Every course has a policy, but on a busy weekend with a line at the counter, that policy can look a little different depending on who’s working. A regular gets a free bucket, or a foursome gets a full rain check after playing 14 holes. Every one of those calls is someone trying to take care of a golfer, and that’s a good instinct. Over a full season, though, those calls add up, and nobody sees the total until someone sits down and adds it up. 

Then there’s where the money actually comes from. At a lot of courses, a handful of big outings and a few peak weeks carry the year. That works until a corporate group moves its event or a wet June wipes out two league nights. If most of your year depends on things you can’t control, you want to know that before you set next year’s budget, not halfway through the season. 

Food and beverage tells its own story, too. A clubhouse can feel busy all season while spend per round slowly slips, because more golfers are grabbing a drink at the turn instead of sitting down after the round. You’d never see that from any single day. Twelve months side by side usually show it. 

Most of these aren’t complicated once you can see them. They tend to come down to a conversation with the team, a clearer policy, or one change to how the tee sheet gets managed. What makes them expensive is that they stay invisible. Every month one of them goes unnoticed, you’re paying for it, and so is the golfer who got a different answer at the counter than their buddy did the week before. 

A lot of the answers are already sitting in your tee sheet, your point of sale, your scheduling software, and the heads of the people who work for you. 

The real question is whether those pieces can see each other. A lot of courses run the tee sheet on one system, the grill on another, the pro shop on a third, and staff schedules on a spreadsheet someone built years ago. Each one does its own job just fine. But seeing spend per round takes the tee sheet and the point of sale working together, and seeing labor cost per round takes the schedule and the tee sheet side by side. When those systems don’t connect, somebody has to pull each report, line them up by hand, and hope the dates match. During the season, that seldom happens. 

So the patterns stay where they are, spread across separate systems that each tell part of the story. For the owner, that means next year gets planned off pieces instead of the whole picture. For the golfer, it means the course doesn’t get better as fast as it could, even though the information to make it better was there all along. 

For some courses, the answer is a better way to pull the reports they already have together. For others, it’s systems that are actually built to work with each other. Either way, it starts with knowing which questions you need those systems to answer, and knowing that before you buy anything, not after. 

Why the offseason is the window

For northern courses, the next few months are the closest thing to a breather all year. The tee sheet is quiet, the phone isn’t ringing every five minutes, and for the first time since April, there’s room to think about something other than today. For southern courses, that room was the summer, and whatever is left of it is closing fast. Either way, the stretch between seasons is the one time the job slows down enough to look at the whole year at once. 

Timing matters for another reason. Most of next year’s big decisions get made before the first tee time of the new season. Budgets, rates, staffing plans, equipment orders, and vendor renewals all get decided over the winter. It’s also when the proposals show up: new software, a simulator package, a range upgrade, a fleet lease. If you don’t have a clear read on last season before one of those lands on your desk, the proposal ends up defining the problem for you. If you look at the year after those decisions are locked, whatever you find has to wait another twelve months. If you look before, it can actually change the plan. 

The offseason isn’t only for looking back, either. It’s also when you can plan for the parts of the year that aren’t peak season. Your numbers will usually show you where the slow stretches are, and the bigger question is what you want to do with them. A lot of courses have more to work with than they use. That could be a clubhouse that could host holiday parties and winter meetings, holiday gift cards and lesson packages, a range that could run clinics deeper into the fall, leagues that could start earlier or run later, or an indoor space that keeps regulars swinging while the course is closed. For southern courses, the same thinking applies to the summer months. 

Golfers are already looking for those options. NGF’s 2026 Graffis Report found total golf participation at its highest level ever, driven by both traditional and off-course experiences. For the owner, the right off-peak program means revenue in months that used to mostly cost money, and steadier work for the people you’d like to keep year-round. For golfers, it means more reasons to stay connected to your course between seasons instead of finding somewhere else to go. 

It’s also the best time to ask the people who were there. Right now, your superintendent, head pro, and counter staff still remember the details, like which Saturday the starter sheet fell apart, which league kept running long, and which policy got the most complaints. By March, a lot of that has faded, and some of the people who knew it won’t be coming back. 

Distance helps, too. A few weeks away from the daily grind makes it easier to read the numbers for what they are instead of how the season felt. The wet May starts to look like what it was, one month, and a strong September stops covering for a soft July. 

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. The offseason has its own to-do list, and stepping back still has to compete with winter projects, budget meetings, and the holidays. It’s real work, and it usually falls on the same few people who just carried the whole season. 

When it does get done, you notice. Next year’s budget gets built on what actually happened instead of how it felt, and the staffing plan fixes last summer’s gaps instead of repeating them. Golfers notice, too, when they come back in the spring and the course is a little better than they left it.

Ways to step back

Getting some distance from the year doesn’t have to be a big project. Most of it comes down to how you look at what you already have. 

Start with a question instead of a report. Before you open anything, write down two or three things you actually want to know. Did weekday play grow, or just weekends? Which programs paid for themselves? Where did you lose people? It sounds small, but a report you open with a question reads a lot differently than one you scroll through hoping something jumps out. 

Break the year into pieces. Annual totals hide almost everything. Look at it month by month, and then compare each month to the same month last year. Split weekends from weekdays and mornings from afternoons. That’s usually where a “full” Saturday morning and a half-empty Saturday afternoon finally show up next to each other. 

Put the systems side by side, even if it’s by hand. If your tee sheet and point of sale don’t talk to each other, pull a season of each and line them up by date. It won’t be pretty, and it doesn’t have to be. Even a rough look at rounds next to spend tells you more than either one does alone. 

Talk to your people before they scatter. Sit down with your superintendent, your head pro, and the folks who worked the counter and the grill, and ask them one simple question: what made your job harder this year than it needed to be? Most of the time, they already know where the friction is. They just haven’t been asked, or there hasn’t been time to listen. Asking also tells your staff that what they know matters. Salesforce research found that employees who feel their voice is heard at work are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to do their best work. That goes a long way when you’re hoping they come back in the spring. 

Look at how the same policy played out across different shifts. Rain checks, comps, pace of play, and how a full tee sheet gets handled are all worth a look. If the answer depends on who was working, that usually isn’t a people problem. It means the policy could be clearer, and most staff will be glad to have it. 

Get a second set of eyes. Sometimes the most useful thing is someone who wasn’t there for every day of the season and has the time to look at it from start to finish. That could be a trusted peer at another course, someone from your ownership group, or an independent outside review. They won’t know your course better than you do. What they bring is a different angle on the same picture, with no history attached and nothing to sell. A good review gives the owner and the team a straight read on what’s working and what isn’t, and what happens next stays your call. That goes double when there’s a proposal waiting for a signature. An outside read before you commit costs far less than finding out after the install that it didn’t fit how your course actually runs. 

Whichever of these you try, the goal is the same. You want to walk into next season knowing what the last one actually told you, not just how it felt. 

Closing thought

Every course has a few numbers that have quietly become normal. Maybe it’s a Saturday that looks full but isn’t, a comp policy that changes by shift, or a schedule nobody has rebuilt since two managers ago. None of them would show up as a problem on any single day, and that’s exactly why they last. 

There’s plenty to work with right now. NGF reports that 2025 set another record for rounds, even with about 2,000 fewer courses than during the early-2000s peak. The golfers are out there, and what decides next year is whether you go into it with a clear read on this one. 

Sometimes getting that read means better reporting, or systems that finally talk to each other. Sometimes it’s a few good questions, the people who were there, and a set of eyes that wasn’t. Usually it’s some of both. Whatever it takes at your course, the one you open next spring will be better for it, and so will the day your golfers have when they show up. 

And if some of the people who knew those answers won’t be back in the spring, now is the time to ask them. Know what last season told you before you sign up for the next one. 

So before next year’s budget gets locked, what number at your course has quietly become normal? 

Sources

1. Tampa Bay Times, “Researchers’ count finds the common snowbird,” November 23, 2004 (citing University of Florida research). Link 

2. University of Florida News, “UF study: New York leads in snowbirds moving temporarily to Florida,” November 2004. Link 

3. National Golf Foundation, “January 2025 National Rounds Played.” Link 

4. National Golf Foundation, “December 2025 National Rounds Played.” Link 

5. GGA Partners, “Key Benchmarking Standards in the Golf Industry,” November 15, 2018. Link 

6. National Golf Foundation and Golf Datatech, “May 2025 National Rounds Played Report.” Link 

7. National Golf Foundation, “May 2025 National Rounds Played,” June 27, 2025. Link 

8. Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, B. L., Schreiber, C. A., and Redelmeier, D. A., “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End,” Psychological Science, 4(6), 1993. Link 

9. Revenue Alert (Noteefy), “Golf’s billion-dollar no-show problem.” Link 

10. First Call Golf, “Tips to manage, stave off no-shows to be addressed in must-attend webinar,” February 9, 2025. Link 

11. First Call Golf, “National Golf Foundation releases annual state-of-industry Graffis Report,” January 29, 2026. Link 

12. Salesforce Research, “The Impact of Equality and Values Driven Business,” via Salesforce Trailhead. Link 

13. National Golf Foundation, “Record Rounds Again in 2025, with 2K Fewer Courses,” February 4, 2026. Link