How to Start Playing Youth Golf
Article by Brendon Elliott, PGA. Published at the PGA on Wednesday, January 11, 2023.
As has been widely reported, the game has been expanding by leaps and bounds over the past few years. That increase also includes golf’s youngest players.
According to the National Golf Foundation, youth golf has experienced exciting growth during the last two years: 3.1 million juniors played golf on a course in 2021, remaining steady after a 24 percent increase in 2020 — the largest since 1997. This segment remains more diverse than the overall golf population.
Additionally, more than one-third, or 36 percent of today’s juniors, are girls compared to 15 percent in 2000, while more than a quarter of juniors are non-Caucasian; just 6 percent were minority participants over 20 years ago.
So it’s (reasonably) safe to say that golf is no longer seen the way it once was by many kids — it’s become cool again, much like the participation boom years of the early 2000s around Tiger Woods’ emergence.
