# The Trends Scorecard: Golf – Grading My Predictions About the Future of the Game
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"Tradition is what keeps golf worth playing. New players are what keep it alive." — Futurist Jim Carroll This is a special one in my Trends Scorecard series. Usually I grade the predictions I made for an industry. This time the industry is one I happen to love: golf. I'm a genuine golf nut — hundreds of tracked rounds, a bag full of gadgets, and more than a few keynotes to the game's leadership. So let's pull up what I actually predicted about the future of golf, and grade it honestly. Here's the scorecard. The setup: the PGA once handed a futurist the opening mic Back in 2010, the PGA of America invited me to be the opening keynote speaker for their Annual General Meeting. It was the first time they had ever had an external speaker open their event, and I did not take that lightly. They knew what everyone in the game knew: that growth was being challenged by demographics, collapsing attention spans, time pressure and a dozen other trends — and that confronting those trends had become one of the most important things they could do. I've been making that case to the golf world ever since. And it's a world I've spent real time inside. I had Claude dig through my blog and pull together the golf and sports groups I've keynoted for over the years: Golf Industry — PGA of America (multiple keynotes, including their first-ever external opening keynote), PGA Merchandise Show, PGA of Ontario Golf Industry Expo Sports, Fitness & Recreation — Sports & Fitness Industry Association, YMCA Canada So how did my calls hold up? Let's pull the receipts. Prediction #1 — "Golf-entertainment will grow the game" (2016) — Nailed it My single best golf call. I championed Topgolf from the stage years before it was obvious, after interviewing its leadership at the PGA Merchandise Show: TopGolf is getting people to try out a golf swing in a fun social environment. Statistics show that 1 out of 3 go on to try out golf in a real golf course. That's a huge driving factor for growth! The grade: Nailed it. Off-course, entertainment-led golf — Topgolf, driving-range experiences, indoor leagues — became the single biggest growth engine the game has seen in a generation, and it did exactly what I said it would: it pulled in young, first-time and non-traditional players. The narrative changed, and this was the change. Prediction #2 — "The future belongs to the tech-savvy junior golfer" (2019) — Hit What is the biggest trend? The arrival of a new, tech savvy golfer ... today's junior golfer lives in a different world. And the fact is - they're gamers, living in a world of constant interaction! That's why disruptors like TopGolf are growing so quickly! The grade: Hit. The game's growth story since 2020 has been younger, more diverse, more digital, and reached through social media exactly as described — the interactive, gamer-native generation, and the parents who live online right alongside them. Prediction #3 — "Sensors in the clubs, data in the game" (2010 & 2015) — Right Back at that 2010 PGA keynote I argued interactive sensor technology — think a baseball bat with an embedded chip — was coming for every sport. By 2015 I was living it, wired up with shot-tracking gear: Webcams, Internet connectivity, motion, GPS and all kinds of other sensor technology are being embedded into equipment now, and there is only more yet to come. This will come to challenge and redefine every sport. The grade: Right — with one honest asterisk I'll own. Connected clubs, GPS watches and shot-tracking systems all arrived and are genuinely good. But as I admitted on my own blog, mass adoption came slower than the hype promised, riding the classic Gartner hype-cycle curve. The technology landed; the universal takeup is still catching up. Prediction #4 — "You'll play Augusta from your living room" (2016) — Hit We'll be able to play Augusta, with our real clubs, in a fully interactive, lifelike 3D experience. The grade: Hit. The at-home and indoor simulator boom — realistic, sensor-driven, play-any-course-in-the-world golf — became one of the fastest-growing parts of the sport, right down to prime-time indoor leagues. The immersive living-room round is now completely normal. Prediction #5 — "Drones are coming to golf" (2015) — Tracking, and personal Right now, drone technology is where the Internet was in about 1993, and in the next 5-10 years we are going to see explosive growth in both the number of drones as well the sophistication of the feature set they support. The grade: Tracking — and this one's personal. Drones are now everywhere in golf-course mapping, marketing and broadcast; my own son's company does exactly this work. Where I was early is the consumer fantasy: the auto-follow drone filming your weekend round hasn't arrived, mostly thanks to regulation. Right about the industry, early on the individual. Prediction #6 — "Self-driving golf carts and precision turf" (2016 & 2019) — Tracking I called autonomous carts and data-engineered, climate-specific turf, on the same acceleration curve I'd been tracking in agriculture. Precision turf management is real and here. Self-driving carts are being piloted but aren't yet standard, and the "grass that glows for 24-hour golf" remains firmly in the science-fiction column. Direction right, timeline still running. The one I got wrong (on purpose, sort of) A scorecard that's all wins isn't a scorecard. So here's the swing that missed. At that same 2010 PGA keynote, I floated a big one: When I keynoted the PGA of America annual general meeting in 2010, I suggested that one day we might have golf balls with webcams embedded in them, and that we'll use this technology for more insight into our game. That's obviously not yet here, but might be one day in the future. The grade: Not here, and I said so myself. The camera-in-the-ball was a swing for the fences. But I'd make the same argument I made about golf carts, which the traditionalists once called an attack on the game: today's outrageous idea is tomorrow's pro shop shelf. Ask me again in ten years. What the scorecard tells us about golf's future Here's the thread through all of it, and it's the same method I use on every industry: watch where the curve is bending, assume it bends faster than the traditionalists want, and follow it. In golf the calls that landed weren't about swing tips or leaderboards. They were about a game finally willing to change its narrative — to meet a new generation where they actually live, to embrace technology instead of fearing it, and to treat every "attack on tradition" as the next opportunity to grow the game. The tradition is sacred. But the future of golf belongs to the people who honor it without letting it outvote what comes next. That's been my message to the game for fifteen years, and the receipts say it's holding up nicely. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a tee time!

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/07/the-trends-scorecard-golf-grading-my-predictions-about-the-future-of-the-game/