A few years ago, if you had asked me whether my club had a healthy membership, I would have answered without much hesitation.
Membership was growing, recruitment was improving and the club felt busier than it had for some time. The board reports reflected that view. Most of the measures we reviewed suggested that things were moving in the right direction and there seemed little reason to think otherwise.
Yet there was one figure that continued to bother me.
The club's churn rate remained persistently higher than I expected.
At first, I assumed this was simply part of the normal ebb and flow of membership. People move away, circumstances change and some level of churn is inevitable. The difficulty was reconciling that explanation with what I could see elsewhere in the data. The long-standing members who formed the core of the club appeared remarkably stable. They weren't leaving in significant numbers and member satisfaction was higher than ever, yet the overall churn rate remained stubbornly high.
If the established members weren't leaving, where was the churn actually coming from?
That question turned out to be more important than I realised.
The more I looked, the more another pattern emerged. The club was recruiting strongly, yet the number of long-standing members wasn't changing very much. New members were arriving, but the established core of the membership remained remarkably static. At first I assumed this was simply an oddity in the data, but the more I examined it, the more it appeared to be telling me something important.
When I later examined the data from a club I work with closely, the same pattern appeared in sharper relief. Between 2023 and 2025, membership grew from 435 to 605 members. Over the same period, however, the number of established members increased from just 292 to 307. Almost all of the growth had come from members still in the early stages of their relationship with the club.
Two clubs, 600 members each
Same headline number — very different membership composition
85%
51%
49%
What struck me was that two clubs with exactly the same membership total could be in completely different positions. One might consist largely of long-term members with a relatively small intake of newer golfers. Another might have exactly the same number of members but derive much more of its membership from people who had joined within the last couple of years.
The membership total would be identical, but future health would be quite different. More importantly, the long-term value those memberships would generate for the club could be dramatically different.
That distinction had never really occurred to me before. Like most clubs, we spent a great deal of time looking at total membership size. We paid far less attention to membership composition. Yet composition turned out to matter enormously. The likelihood of leaving is not spread evenly across a membership base. It depends on where a member is in their journey with the club. At the same club, a member in their first year is around four times more likely to resign than one who has been with the club for five years. Early tenure members are still deciding whether the club fits into their lives, whereas established members made that decision years ago and are less likely to revisit it.
Our own analysis suggested that established members contributed around 56% more in subscription income and secondary spend than newer members. Membership composition was not simply influencing retention. It was influencing the long-term value of the membership itself.
Once I started thinking about membership in those terms, the idea of a single measure of membership health began to feel inadequate. A club with 600 members is not necessarily healthier than a club with 550. Equally, a growing membership is not automatically stronger than a stable one.
The question isn't simply how many members a club has today. It is how those members are distributed across the lifecycle of membership, and how likely they are to become long-term members of the club.
That distinction changed the way I thought about membership. Rather than viewing it as a single headline number, I began to see it as something that was constantly in motion — every member at a different stage of deciding whether the club was going to become a long-term part of their life. The unsettling part was how invisible that motion was in the annual figures. A growing membership could be carrying significant future risk. A stable one could be building quietly on solid foundations. The headline number wouldn't tell you which was which.