But Where Are the Women's Clubs?

Golf Magazine has put up an article summarizing some of the new clubs for 2016, complete with pictures and videos. It looks to be a good overview of the new men's clubs that have been introduced so far and, for those of you looking for new sticks, it looks to be fairly thorough. But unless I overlooked them, something is missing.

Where are the women's models?



Perhaps I'm just overlooking them, I said to myself. Perhaps I just need to Google it.

So I did. I popped over to Google and searched for "2016 women's golf clubs." And I found NOTHING. Oh, there were listings of women's clubs for sale... but I couldn't find anything with both "2016" and "women" in the hits.

For an industry that claims it needs to "embrace" more of the potential golfing population -- especially women -- it seems strange to me that the marketing for new models excludes them. I'm sure that's really going to encourage women to take up the game.

Perhaps I'm alone in my disappointment. I understand that men's clubs make up the bulk of golf sales and that manufacturers will therefore focus their marketing efforts on those models. And perhaps those potential players who are being ignored won't care -- after all, once they take a quick look and find nothing, they'll put that silly idea about playing golf out of their minds and move on to sports where the equipment is more readily available.

Still, it disturbs me. I have heard endless talk about "growing the game" yet none of the movers and shakers -- that is, the folks with the money to make it happen -- seem interested on following through. Golf is expensive and time-consuming, and perhaps some of that can't be helped. But we could at least make the equipment easy to obtain.

And if we aren't going to do even that much, perhaps it's time we stop moaning about the declining popularity of golf. Let's just admit that we want golf to be an elitist sport and that we like it that way. As someone once said, it's time to put up or shut up.

End of rant.