In particular, they hope millennials will be more interested in courses with only nine holes. Or even fewer.
5 min
Golf has been a game of 18 holes ever since the ruling bodies of the sport decreed it so at the end of the 19th century. But now, some course operators—and even the U.S. Golf Association—are challenging the idea.
The idea is that less could be more, in terms of breathing much-needed new life into the game. When would-be golfers don’t play, the main reason given is the length of an 18-hole round—typically four hours or longer.
While pros and many serious players will continue to play 18 holes, the industry is looking at ways to shorten the game for others. Lots of courses are marketing nine-hole options, and some tout even fewer holes than that.
“The most common complaint we hear is that the game takes too long,” says Steve Skinner, chief executive of KemperSports, a Chicago-based owner and manager of more than 100 courses across the country. “We need to let them know golf does not have to be a four- or five-hour experience.”
The USGA has lent its stamp of approval to shorter games, beginning with its “Play 9” initiative, launched in 2014, consisting of TV ads, especially during the heavily watched U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open telecasts, and an effort to give owners marketing ideas to promote the nine-hole option at their courses. The association also permits scores from nine-hole games to be posted on its USGA Handicap Index.
“The nine-hole round, the two-hour experience, is much closer to the type of entertainment people usually have,” says Rand Jerris, senior managing director of public services for the USGA. “Going to a movie. Two hours. Going to dinner. Two hours. Two-hour windows seem to fit comfortably in the American lifestyle. For people like that, nine holes works.”
According to the National Golf Foundation, there are 3,777 nine-hole golf facilities in the U.S., or about 26% of the total number of courses.
The shorter game is particularly targeted at millennials, who currently are playing a lot less than their parents or grandparents did at a similar age, mainly due to the game’s length, says Mr. Skinner.
To Kevin Berliner, at 32 a millennial himself, the problem is the mercurial nature of his generation.
“It’s about perception. Millennials will wait 3½ hours for the best burger in town, but will say 3½ hours for golf is too long,” says Mr. Berliner, who is a medical-device salesman and participates in the Young Executives Program at Cantigny Golf, a public course in Wheaton, Ill.
Cantigny and other courses market nine holes as an option for all golfers. But, as Mr. Berliner says, the shorter round is particularly attractive for people in his age group, especially at the end of a working day.
“It’s not just the golf course that matters,” Mr. Berliner says. “If we can go to a place where you can play nine holes and then get a burger and a beer, that is very enticing to the younger generation.”
Indeed, many facilities are looking to pair shortened rounds of golf with food and drink. Various versions of “Nine-and-Dine” promotions are being marketed to couples and families, and some locations are cutting even more holes. A six-hole round of golf with an on-course happy hour after play is offered at Chambers Bay, a course managed by KemperSports just outside of Seattle and the site of the 2015 U.S. Open.
Skyway Golf Course in Jersey City, N.J., offers another possible alternative—a shortened game, and beautiful greens, in a more urban setting. Built in 2015, this upscale, public, nine-hole course features challenging holes with dunes and a view of the Manhattan skyline. TJ Wydner, who oversees the facility, says Skyway did more than 40,000 rounds last year despite being closed for six weeks because of Covid. He says the course is more accessible and popular with time-compressed serious golfers who want to squeeze in a quality two-hour round.
Golf-course owners, especially in expensive urban areas, may find another benefit of fewer holes: cost. “We know that land is expensive and that it is expensive to maintain 18 holes,” Mr. Jerris says. “We know for the game to be sustained, it has to be on a smaller footprint.”
The timing for a shift to shorter games and courses seems favourable. The big story in the early 2000s had been the closing of many golf courses as a result of overbuilding for a big boon that never came. When Covid hit, operators prepared for the worst last summer.
Instead, the opposite occurred. With many entertainment options closed, people flocked to golf courses seeking to be outdoors, and to find a sense of normalcy. According to the National Golf Foundation, golf in the U.S. last year experienced a 14% increase in rounds from 2019, and that figure would have been much higher if virtually every course hadn’t been shut in the spring. More telling was the volume from June through year’s end: Packed courses had approximately 75 million more rounds nationally than in the same stretch in 2019.
Another dynamic also came into play. With people working more at home, thus eliminating their commutes in many cases, many found time to play golf, perhaps by sneaking out for an early-morning nine or shutting down the computer for a late afternoon round. In previous years, typical tee sheets often had plenty of vacancies from 2 to 5 p.m., Mr. Skinner says. Not last year.
“Those times were full every day,” Mr. Skinner says. The pandemic “completely flipped the tee sheet.”
Mr. Skinner does not think it was a one-year trend either. With expectations that many people will continue to work remotely once things return to normal, that means they will again have more time to play golf.
Mr. Jerris believes it is incumbent for operators to be creative, giving golfers more alternatives than just playing 18 holes. He notes that some courses are experimenting with fees based on the numbers of holes played or by the hour.
“Golf operators have to understand they have a lot of unused inventory on their tee sheets,” Mr. Jerris says. “Perhaps they can send players off the back nine when it is empty in the early morning. They can look at sending people out to play a few holes when there isn’t much daylight left. Those kinds of things are found revenue at no additional expense.”
Ultimately, it is about getting and keeping people engaged in the game, Mr. Skinner says. He speaks from personal experience. Even though he is a leading golf-industry executive, his children never got into the game before last year. During the pandemic, he often played late afternoon, nine-hole family rounds. Those outings led to his 23-year old son, Jack, getting the bug, as he played more than 30 rounds last year. Mr. Skinner now describes his son as “being addicted” to golf.
That is exactly the aim of the Play 9 campaign and other initiatives to get people out to the course. The idea is for them to become returning golfers, no matter how many holes they play.
“Golf is an addictive game,” Mr. Skinner says. “But first we’ve got to get people out to experience it. Once they do, hopefully they keep coming back for more.”
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: April 7, 2021.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
Rugged coastal drives and fireside drams define a slow, indulgent journey through Scotland’s far north.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
