Narrative: The Plight of the Pre-Covid Golfer
You are a pre-Covid golfer. You live in the suburbs. You are exhausted.
The numbers you already suspected have now been confirmed: golf participation is up 38% since 2019, and 2025 marks the fourth time in five years that rounds played have hit a record high, trending 21% above the 2015–2019 average. You read these stats the way a man reads a doctor's report that explains, in clinical detail, exactly why he feels terrible.
You don't want to be the "Shrink the Game" guy. You genuinely don't. Half your friend group picked up the game post-Covid and you love that for them. What you don't love is that tee times at every course within a 40-mile radius, from the $40 muni with the flooded bunkers to the $250 semi-private that just repainted its cart paths, are now gone within minutes of dropping, seven days out, rain or shine, March through November. You used to call the starter on a Tuesday morning and ask if he could squeeze in a twosome. Now you call and he admonishes you for even asking.
Course management, well versed on the concept of supply and demand, have responded with the one move guaranteed to make everything worse: tee times every 7 minutes. You do the hypothetical. Imagine every single group on the course is made up of scratch golfers, zero wasted motion, pure efficiency. You're still looking at a 4-hour round. Now you abandon that fantasy and return to reality, where the course is populated by a generation of golfers whose entire game was built around hitting it as hard as physically possible with no corresponding investment in what happens after the ball lands. Bricks for hands around the green. You are now looking at 5 to 6 hours while constantly on alert for for a fly ball from three fairways over with no “fore” call.
You've done your homework on the private clubs. Made the calls, sent the cold emails, the ones where you have just enough connections to not get immediately hung up on. The initiation fees come back: $70k on the low end and $150k on the high end. You wince, then reconsider. You've been responsible. While your friends were dropping money on dinners, watches, and concerts, you were quietly funneling savings into what you told yourself was an earmarked "golf fund". You run the numbers. They work. Barely, but they work. You lie awake doing the math. You email the membership coordinator. This is happening.
The paperwork arrives. You take a breath, pick up the pen to sign, and the coordinator mentions, almost as an aside: "Just so you know, you'll be number 72 on the waitlist. We typically see 5 to 7 members churn per year."
You put the pen down.
Ten years. Best case. And that assumes you're still in the area, still employed, still living. You're not even sure where you'll be in three years.
You pivot to muni memberships. $10,000 a year for unlimited golf, which sounds reasonable until you remember the greens fee is $80 and the round will take the better part of a workday. The payback math doesn't work, and the course doesn't either. You briefly entertain building a bot to snipe early tee times before anyone else can get to them. You open a few browser tabs. You close them. Your technical skills, it turns out, are not up to par.
And so here you are. A guy who genuinely loves this game being quietly edged out of the very thing that was supposed to be his respite. The cruelest part is that you're not even angry at the new golfers. Golf's boom is good for the game. You know that. You just assumed there'd still be room for you in it.
So you do what any reasonable, slightly unhinged golf obsessive does: you set your alarm for 5:30 AM a week in advance to try to steal a Saturday tee time at the course you've always considered beneath you. You tell yourself it's temporary. That the boom will plateau. That the tee sheets will breathe again.
You tap "Book” within seconds of the sheet opening.
Already gone.
Somewhere out there, a guy who picked up the game in 2021 is taking a beaver tail divot on the 4th fairway, AND he has a tee time for Saturday.
You do not.