The Pellucid Perspective - May 2022 - 9

and relevancy that would fend off incursions like Topgolf.
What Topgolf has succeeded at and shown us is that you can
build a franchise from nothing with meaningful money committed
over a mid-range time horizon and good messaging
on a marginal business model. I believe that the golf operations
business model has considerably more upside and staying
power but our challenge has been that we can't, due to our
structure and fragmentation, marshal our brainpower, conflicting
interests of both operators and existing institutions/
power brokers and financial resources to replicate Topgolf's
awareness success to the core tasks of player/skill development;
the former being attracting non-golfers to our sport,
the latter being increasing their skill level to retain more of
them and at increasing frequencies over time.
Colleague Harvey Silverman in a recent email exchange
on this topic brought up two ancillary thoughts to the debate
over whether Topgolf will ultimately prove to be accretive or
dilutive to the sport of golf. The first is the new El Segundo
CA facility which will be the first instance where Topgolf is
co-located with a 9 hole Learning & Practice facility. While
this will be a very interesting experience of seeing whether
co-location works to cross-expose Topgolfers to the sport of
golf, the interesting follow-on question will be, " If so, how
many potential locations are there in the US to replicate this
co-location environment? " My guess is going to be " very few "
and, as Harvey will relate, navigating the negotiations and getting
that deal done in El Segundo was a multi-year, multiparty/interests
adventure and ultimately took something just
short of an act of God to pull off. Harvey's other observation
is that Topgolf's TopTracer application for golf courses may
be that franchise's greater gift to golf.
I've used the retrofitted
TopTracer range here locally last summer at Heritage
Oaks (the former Sportsmans in Northbrook IL) and found
it to be helpful, fun and worth (a little bit) more money to
get feedback on swing/shot characteristics working through
the bag on the range. Most of the value in that came from it
telling me that my carry distances were about 5-10 yards short
of what I thought with nearly every club in the bag (sigh)
but that's very helpful and explains why I'm losing strokes on
the course and hitting into hazards or bad scoring positions
with regular frequency. The ultimate irony in this future world
where TopTracer range becomes nearly ubiquitous is that golf
courses will be funding an indirect competitor along the way.
That said, I think we've seen that Topgolf isn't going to be the
direct or immediate demise of golf and, if we could just get organized,
focused and funded around player/skill development,
we could grow faster and more sustainably, regardless of the
strategic fate of Topgolf.
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The Pellucid Perspective - May 2022

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