Golf in Smaller Bites: The club of yesterday added fitness. The club of tomorrow adds frequency.

Technology rarely changes what members want from a club. It changes what a club can give them. Lights, ball-tracking screens and automated turf equipment have together made a category of golf possible that did not exist at most clubs five years ago: golf on a weeknight, in forty minutes, without a tee time.

That deserves the same attention the industry once gave fitness.

Not long ago we debated seriously whether fitness belonged at a golf club, and the argument against it was reasonable: We are a golf club, and square footage devoted to treadmills is square footage taken from something with proven demand. Anyone stewarding a member-owned club had an obligation to ask. The answer turned out to be yes, and the clubs that reached it early built sooner and cheaper. The ones that arrived late retrofitted a space never meant for it and apologized for the ceiling height.

The lesson was never really about fitness. It was about the calendar. A club offering one reason to visit, in good weather, on a schedule that demands half a day is competing for a small slice of a member’s life. Fitness widened the calendar. That was the actual return.

Golf is Not Shrinking; It is Being Consumed Differently

The constraint on golf has never been interest. It’s the block of time. Five hours plus a drive is a serious ask of someone with a job and children, so members ration their play — a full round Saturday, guilt about it, then Wednesday skipped entirely.

The same member will happily hit balls for 40 minutes after work, play nine at dusk, or bring three friends out for an hour over a few beers. That is all still golf; it’s just golf in smaller bites.

The national numbers say it out loud. The National Golf Foundation reported U.S. participation at an all-time high of 48.1 million in 2025, with off-course golf drawing 32.6 million participants against 28.1 million on-course. More Americans now play golf away from a golf course than on one. The appetite was never the problem. The portion size was.

What Laredo Country Club Built

Laredo (Texas) Country Club, founded in 1983, built a 19-bay covered practice and social facility (see photo, pg. 4). It features ball-tracking screens at every bay, lounge seating set back from the hitting line, lights that carry play to 10 p.m., and a full short-game complex of target greens and real bunkering.

Then it measured, for 611 consecutive days.

The result (see chart at right) is a demand curve most clubs never get to see. Weekday afternoons move quietly. Then the workday ends. Five p.m. occupancy climbs over 30 percent, six p.m. to over 40, and seven p.m. peaks at near 50, on a Tuesday. Eight p.m. still holds at over 40%.

The busiest hours of the week at Laredo are hours during which many golf course operations in America have already closed.

Saturday behaves differently and just as usefully. It doesn’t spike, it plateaus, holding at over 25 percent from noon straight through six p.m. — six unbroken hours of continuous use by members warming up before their rounds, along with members who came out just to hit.

Notice What the Space Became

It is not a practice tee. The lounge furniture between the bays is the reason a member brings three friends and stays 90 minutes for 40 minutes of golf. Families come out after dinner. Juniors who can’t do 18 holes will hit for an hour and love it.

Most significantly, the facility reaches members of every age and demographic who are now playing golf in a way they could not before, and who are meeting the game without being intimidated by it. No starter, no tee sheet, no group waiting behind them, no five-hour commitment to find out whether they like it. At their own club, on their own schedule.

That is reach a golf course cannot generate on its own.

Capacity Without Added Headcount

Fifteen hours a day, six days a week, for 611 days is an operational challenge before it is a membership win. Laredo met it with equipment: two robotic mowers, a robotic picker, and an automated ball pit and wash system.

The agronomic benefits are real: Lighter machines cutting more often put less stress on the turf, and a gentler wash cycle extends ball life. The operational benefit is larger. Clean-picking a range normally requires golf operations and course maintenance to negotiate a window in which the facility is unavailable to members. That negotiation is gone.

The equipment is not the point—what the club did with the hours it recovered is. The labor a 19-bay facility would otherwise consume in mowing, picking and washing now goes to service, instruction and programming. Technology added the capacity. People still deliver the experience.

More to Come 

In an upcoming McMahon Report, my colleague Christian Clerc will examine two clubs delivering off-course golf in other ways: Midland (Mich.) Country Club and Big Spring Country Club in Kentucky.