Page 66 - GBC Fall Eng 2016

In August, golf has a huge oppor- tunity to showcase all that’s good about the game to a worldwide audience. With its return to the Olympics for the first time since 1904, golf will reach viewers in places where the game is not a part of the sporting culture.
And that, the stakeholders hope, will lead to more people playing the game. They hope that it will be the magic elixir for everything from a flattening in participation, to the closing of courses, and a decline in equipment sales.
However, golf may want to take a hard look at another sport that has gone down the same path with the same hopes, and can attest that while the Olympics is an opportunity, it is also only one plank in the construction.
In1998,curlingjoinedtheOlympic family and the expectations were that there would be ice facilities springing up from Moscow to Beijing. Once people saw the sport and how much fun it could be, there would be calls of ‘Hurry Hard’ around the world. Or so said the world’s curling leaders.
But, that didn’t happen. Instead, what the Olympic movement delivered was the start of several elite programs specifically designed to build athletes who could win medals. Most of these were in countries that had little or no connection with the game of ice and stones prior to its Olympic debut.
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In China, for example, five women were pulled from the gymnastics programs and told they were to be trained as curlers. The Chinese government sent them to live in Edmonton for eight months a year, learning and training in the sport of curling under Canadian coaches.
The program was a huge success; within 10 years, they were world champions. In 2010 in Vancouver, the team won the bronze medal at the Olympics.
But to this day, there are no curling clubs in Beijing, no Thursday night men’s league and no weekend bonspiels.Curlingremainsprimarily a sport of elite athletes.
In Canada, the Olympics has created lots of attention for curling, but there has been no coordinated effort to leverage all the attention. Any growth has been through the initiative of individual clubs or determined viewers who wanted to try the game.
It was only in the U.S. where curling experienced some growth. Open houses at curling centres saw massive lineups and the United States Curling Association helped push a “come-out-and-try-it” program at clubs from coast to coast.
That is the lesson that golf needs to take from curling. Simply having your sport in the Games won’t create growth. It really is just “an open for business” sign. Much more needs to be done, including hard work at the grassroots level.
Courses need to do things such as promote free lessons, three-hole rounds, used equipment sales, and other ideas to show television viewers how to start playing.
Governing bodies and indivi- dual courses need to take the initiative and realize that the Olympics is just the first step. But it is amassiveopportunitythatshouldn’t bepassedup.Curlingdidn’tdothat when it made its debut, but slowly it learned the lesson.
This is a lesson that golf needs to understand from the outset if it wants the game to flourish.
66Golf Business Canada
Bob Weeks
Bob has been one of the most well-known faces in Canadian golf and curling for more than 25 years, and was recently inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Follow Bob at twitter.com/bobweekstsn.