Golf course superintendents contrast New Year’s Resolutionites.
As a group, they prefer doing over talking. Sometimes that penchant for action instead of explanation places superintendents in precarious positions. Don’t blame golfers for not understanding what they neither see nor hear. Think about it this way: Do you understand what your golfers do for a living?
Which brings us to a potential 2026 resolution: consider making a concerted effort to better communicate your team’s triumphs and predicaments with golfers and stakeholders in real time.
Our recently released 2026 Numbers to Know report confirmed what we started hearing and seeing beginning late last June. Wild weather swings yielded significant angst. The weather-sparked agronomic challenges, which morphed into human-driven perceptual conundrums, made it easy for superintendents to overlook a giant positive: they work in a growth industry.
When Golf Datatech and the National Golf Foundation release final 2025 totals later this month, annual rounds played should eclipse 550 million for the first time. Moreover, 67 percent of respondents in our Numbers to Know survey indicated they are either “very confident” or “confident” in their facility’s overall finances, compared with just 1 percent who are “not confident at all.” One flip through The Economist, The Wall Street Journal or any other beefy financial-focused publication illustrates the uncertainty facing dozens of industries.
Golf hasn’t been in a financial spot this good in more than two decades. The industry enters 2026 shielded from perplexing global dilemmas.
Yet superintendents found it difficult to appreciate golf’s desirable position in 2025. Macro success doesn’t always equate to micro relief. Some superintendents became insular in 2025, as they were peppered with to-their-faces and behind-their-backs questions about why courses didn’t play or look like they did in 2024. One superintendent at a prominent cool-weather facility told us he was ready for 2025 to be over in May. According to the Gregorian calendar, May remains the fifth of the 12 months.
Why did a fun job suck at times in 2025? The weather, stupid! Even the brightest minds, grittiest mentalities, fittest bodies, priciest solutions and sharpest reels will struggle when 90-degree days follow a dousing. Turf wilts and greens slow when the atmosphere and soil become grosser than a disfigured cryptid.
Fifty-eight percent of superintendents ranked 2025 as “very challenging” or “challenging,” according to our survey. Only 9 percent viewed the year as “not challenging at all” or “somewhat challenging.”
Did golfers realize 2025 represented a weather anomaly? When turf doesn’t appear and perform as tidy as expected, questions arise. This doesn’t make golfers jerks or awful people. It makes them human.
Superintendents and their teams are also human despite feats often suggesting they possess superpowers. Turf weakens and slows when challenges like the ones 2025 presented emerge.
Diligent communication helps individuals and groups in tricky spots. One work-related 2026 resolution worth making — and keeping — involves being more resolute when communicating with golfers and stakeholders.
Use 2025 as a guide and anticipate potential 2026 concerns. Start developing concise and reasoned answers to those concerns. Don’t become insular if things get tough. Become more visible. If conditions suffer due to uncontrollable factors in July, don’t wait until late October to reveal corrective measures. Explanations and solutions rarely surface in real time, but customers deserve real-time reassurances that concerns will be addressed.
Start simple. Devote an additional 10 to 20 minutes per peak-season week to your communications program. Don’t have a communications program? Get going. What good is your agronomic program if stakeholders and golfers don’t understand why it doesn’t always function as … well … planned?
Like everything in work and life, becoming a better communicator requires an upfront commitment. Controlling your department’s story to limit human-centered angst can be the best work resolution you make in 2026.
Especially if 2025 wasn’t an anomaly.
Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry’s publisher + editor-in-chief.
