Women's golf is the game's growth engine — and amateur golf is where it gets real

Every so often a report crosses our desk that puts hard numbers to something we've been watching anecdotally for years. Old Tom Capital's new market outlook, The Ecosystem of Women's Golf (Q3 2026), is one of those. It's written for investors, but the data inside it should matter to anyone who runs a tournament, coaches a junior, or cares about where the amateur game is headed.

The headline figures are striking. Citing National Golf Foundation year-end data, the report puts women at roughly 8.1 million on-course golfers in the U.S. — 28 percent of the on-course population and an all-time high, up from 20 percent as recently as 2012. Women have accounted for about 60 percent of the net growth in on-course golfers since 2019. And the pipeline skews even more sharply: girls now make up 35 percent of junior golfers, compared to 15 percent in 2000.