The Pellucid Perspective - July 2017 - 4

INDUSTRY DATA

tance to promote and provide that technology to the fact that
there would be no money in it for the software companies, although he suggested that if a provider could generate a sufficiently large number of clients providing their rounds, the companies
could conceivably use the additional resource to improve their
value proposition for clients.
"We at the NGCOA want to help facilitate the counting of
rounds," Karen said. "We're very interested in picking up the baton to generate rounds reporting on a national basis. We've started to contact independent contractors to possibly work with the
PGA and NGCOA toward that end."
As for the PGA of America, that organization appears content
to put its support behind their PGA Annual Operations Survey
for the time being. Asked for some insight into the PGA's current
thoughts regarding the need for monthly rounds reporting, Senior Director of Global and Corporate Strategy Arjun Chowdri
referred us to the PGA's March 2016 press release announcing
the discontinuation of Performance Trak and the continuation of
the Annual Operations Survey as an industry benchmarking tool.
There was reportedly an attempt earlier this year to assemble
a cooperative venture to generate a comprehensive benchmarking and tabulation system for golf course operations including,
among others, NGCOA, PGA of America, Golf Datatech, Pellucid Corp. and others, but nothing came together.
At present, it appears that Golf Datatech's Stine and the NG-

COA's Karen are of two very different mindsets about the best
way to collect rounds data from a sufficiently large number of
courses to generate reliable and helpful data. Stine feels that the
traditional facility-based reporting that Golf Datatech has always
used could still provide statistically viable data if more courses
would commit to providing monthly rounds totals to Datatech.
Karen feels that a cooperative effort with the industry's software
providers is the only way to generate a large enough number of
participating courses to produce optimal data for valid benchmarking.
"As long as we have courses hand-entering rounds data, we'll
never get much more than 2,000 to 3,000 courses and we'll certainly never get to the 5,000 or even 10,000 we'd like to have,"
Karen said.
For his part, Stine intends to continue Golf Datatech's
monthly rounds report, although astute observers will notice that
the number of courses reporting is no longer included. Asked if
the time is nearing when the Datatech rounds report is discontinued completely, Stine said, "I hope not. We're not there yet. We
still have enough national and regional numbers that we can still
provide that, although we've had to eliminate some MSAs where
we don't have enough courses reporting. We started reporting
rounds in 1999 because we thought it would be a good thing for
the industry to have monthly numbers, and we still feel that way.
We just need more cooperation."
n

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