Rough times ahead for grassroots golf?

While the professional game of golf gears up for 2015 in rude health, at grassroots level the sport finds itself in the rough.

With more prize money on offer for the stars than ever before — 97 players won over $1 million on the PGA Tour last year — and lucrative sponsorship deals, golf can rest safe in the knowledge that the future is bright for those competing at its top end.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, however, the sport stands at a crossroads, with recent years having brought about a major slump in popularity in its traditional heartlands of the U.S. and the UK and Ireland.

As golf continues to hemorrhage players, the steps it chooses to take next could prove crucial in turning its fortunes around.

Some 400,000 people reportedly left the sport in the past year in the U.S., although the National Golf Foundation (NGF) states: “The numbers quoted don’t reconcile with NGF data and they’re not something that we reported or would report.”

NGF results do show that the sport in the U.S. has lost five million players in the last decade, with 20% of the existing 25 million golfers poised to quit in the next few years.

To compound that depressing statistic, the number of newcomers to the game in the U.S. fell by 20% last year, while according to Sport England, the amount of 16-25-year-olds playing the game regularly almost halved in England between 2009-10 and 2012-13.

Such dominance can only be of good for the grassroots game, and those tasked with increasing its popularity are confident enough in the work being done that they are refusing to hit the panic button just yet.

“We’re realistic — there’s challenges, there’s troubles, like there have always been,” Bevacqua says. “They’re different, but golf’s resilient and will get through this if we’re smart, and I think the industry is smart.”

Sharpe also remains optimistic about golf’s fortunes in the coming years, pointing to the growth of the game globally.

“There is still a very high participation around the world and it is growing in parts of the world,” Sharpe says. “So I think we should be quietly confident that golf is going to be in a good spot going forward.”

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CNN