Will a new membership product change the Irish club golfing landscape?
A potentially revolutionary new golf membership product launched earlier this month offers all of those floating golfers an official World Handicap System (WHS) handicap for €119.
There are no hard and fast figures but if you look beyond the 200,000 or so affiliated golf club members in Ireland, as many more again simply like to play. Not so much floating voters as roaming golfers.
It’s estimated that about 20,000 of them joined courses last year - an average of 60 or so per club - in what will be remembered as golf’s Covid boom but there are still plenty more out there. Have clubs, will travel.
Which is pretty much where FlexyGolf.com enters the market, an interesting and potentially revolutionary new golf membership product launched earlier this month which at its very core offers all of those floating golfers an official World Handicap System (WHS) handicap for €119.
There is more to it, like a welcome pack and various benefits, but distilled down it is an attempt to engage those who want to play competitively - a handicap allows players to enter open competitions and other events which are played throughout the year on virtually all golf courses - at a fraction of the price of a regular club membership.
As FlexyGolf director Tony Judge stated on a recent podcast: "Honestly, it’s throwaway money, €119. You’ve now got a handicap, you’re a member of a club, it’s (the price of) a round of drinks."
The club you’ll be a member of is FlexyGolf’s virtual club. Drill down a little and it’s tied to two physical "partner" golf clubs; Blacklion Golf Club in Cavan and Highfield in Kildare, who will effectively be responsible for overseeing the handicaps that are distributed.
Jo Maes, FlexyGolf’s Operations Director, says that in the week or so since the product has hit the market, they’ve already taken on 30 members. Each of those are required, under WHS rules, to play three rounds a year at their partner course to maintain their handicap.
As a result, membership take up could be relatively local initially and FlexyGolf is currently speaking with clubs in Clare and Donegal to expand the service.
“Holland is a great example for what we’re doing,” Belgian Maes told the . “There were 150,000 playing golf in Holland about 25, 30 years ago. The sport was flatlining, no courses were being built. So they opened the thing up to non-club members and the figure shot up to 400,000.
"Initially clubs were against it but then they realised the courses were full, people enjoyed the experience and ultimately morphed into members at their local clubs. That transformed the Dutch golf scene because there were more golf magazines, more corporate involvement, just much more golf activity.”
There are other examples throughout Europe of how this model of non-club members paying for handicaps to play a broad range of different courses works well. The trouble is, Golf Ireland doesn’t support it here.
Asked for their position on the new product, Golf Ireland responded with the following statement.
“We are aware that an organisation has recently launched advertising flexible golf membership and official WHS Handicap indices. This venture is not recognised by, or affiliated to, Golf Ireland which is the WHS handicapping authority for the island of Ireland. Golf Ireland’s commitment remains to support our affiliated clubs through the pandemic and assist them retaining and growing their membership.”
It amounts to an early red flag for FlexyGolf but does it actually matter? It would appear not.
Judge, who is also the founder of Clubs to Hire, a worldwide club rental business, says they’ll plough on and projects 250-300 new members this year and whilst acknowledging the company’s "disruptive" presence in the golf market believes they will ultimately grow into something too big for Golf Ireland to ignore.
What exactly does Golf Ireland fear? The first thing is perhaps change itself. Golf membership has always been about joining a local course and stumping up your dues every 12 months, anything from around €500 to €3,000 depending on where you’re a member.
“There are concerns we will take members away from clubs,” said Maes. “But if you’re a good club and you look after your members and your facilities properly, you should have no worries.
The reality is that paying for a handicap to play opens and wanting to be a member of your local course are two completely different things. Joining a local club allows you to play, say, six, nine or 12 holes a few evenings a week. You can take a shower, use the putting green, relax in the bar, play inter-club competitions and compete for the Captain’s Prize. It’s all covered in your subscription fee.
For FlexyGolf members, the primary motivation is simply to have a handicap, to play on different courses. Each time they play they will still have to pay for it though they will reason that if they play 15 rounds a season on various courses, at €30 a pop, the €450 is far cheaper than the €1,000 they might have paid in local club dues.
Another likely Golf Ireland fear is that ‘bandits’ will pay the €119, get a hokey handicap of, say, 20 when they actually play off significantly better, and clean up on the open competition scene. For a small investment, they could win prizes worth multiples of that.
“The WHS will sort that out because if I go out with my new handicap and shoot 45 points in an event, well my handicap is going to come tumbling down as a result,” said Maes.
“We are operating fully within the WHS system and any competition I play in, say in Portmarnock Links or on my holidays in Kerry, they’ll all be returned to the WHS system for assessment, like any regular club golfer.”
Unlike most golf courses, FlexyGolf doesn’t distinguish between men and women, charging the same rate to both. They envisage a transient membership with many enjoying the experience enough over two or three years to eventually take the plunge and join their local course.
The product is helped by the fact that under the WHS system, introduced to Ireland last year, casual golf can now count towards handicap increases and decreases.
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