Nineteen million Americans have tried golf since 2020. About one in four of them stayed.
In this episode of The Bag Drop: Untold Stories in Golf, host Matt Considine and co‑host Dr. Kevin Moore (a.k.a. “The Professor”) sit down with Matthew Reagan, PGA (co-founder and general manager of Operation 36) to talk about why golf keeps losing the beginners it works so hard to attract — and what changed the day he stopped teaching the swing first and started people 25 yards from the hole.
The conversation dives into:
- The year-four gut punch: a junior program running at 95% retention that still lost forty golfers, and the single thing the kids who stayed all had in common
- A year of three-hour nine-hole rounds, a drive to Pinehurst, and the flip that turned into Operation 36 — start at 25 yards, shoot 36, back up
- Why the environment around a beginner matters more than the technical ability of the coach, and what that says about how golf picks its heroes
- The women who told him they had always wanted to play but had never been given permission to start that close to the green
- Opening the app to everyone in 2027 — couch to course, course to coach — and what an app should refuse to pretend it can replace
Connect with our guests
⛳ Matthew Reagan, PGA — co-founder and general manager, Operation 36 — 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-reagan-op36/
📱 Operation 36 — https://operation36.golf — how it works: https://operation36.golf/how-it-works/
🐦 X/Twitter: https://x.com/op36golf — 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/operation_36/ — 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/operation-36-golf — 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/op36golf/
Join the NewClub community
🌍 Website: https://www.newclub.golf
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/newclubgolf/
🐦 X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/newclubgolf
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@newclubgolf
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/newclub
Links & Partners
🐝 NewClub: https://www.newclub.golf
🏌️ Titleist: https://www.titleist.com
🌐 Golf Blueprint: https://www.golfblueprint.com
Listen to The Bag Drop
🎧 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bag-drop-untold-stories-in-golf/id1430328006
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🎧 Web: https://thebagdrop.fm/
Connect with Matt & The Professor
🎙️ Matt Considine — 🐦 X/Twitter: https://x.com/consequential85 | 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/consequence18/ | 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-considine-103bb21/
📚 Dr. Kevin Moore ("The Professor") — 🐦 X/Twitter: https://x.com/kevcmoore | 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kevcmoore | 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-moore-177b30b3/
🗣️Contribute to the show! — 📧 email: thebagdrop@newclub.golf
Chapters
00:00 Cold open: the moment Operation 36 got its name
00:52 Welcome, and a fall morning in Athens
01:20 Ten kids under eight: not rested, but refreshed
03:35 Unplugging, the Slack away message, and the phone-off experiment
06:45 New York, Mumford and Sons, and whether you could live there
08:37 Today's guest: Matthew Reagan and Operation 36
10:10 What Op36 did to Athens Country Club
11:19 Scotland as the barometer: beginners go straight to the course
12:00 Professor's teaching: sampling versus early specialization
15:13 Ad read: Titleist AIM Enhanced and seeing the ball go in
17:18 Matthew joins The Bag Drop
18:16 Sixteen, upstate New York, and a course you could play for free
20:25 Campbell, Ryan Dailey, and deciding to coach
21:46 What actually turned him into a golfer, and it was not technique
25:28 Gamification, variability, and why golf hooks you
28:58 Three juniors at Keith Hills, and a program that grew to eighty
30:01 Ten levels, bag tags, and making a three-footer fun for an hour
32:19 Year four: forty golfers do not come back
33:59 North Carolina Long Term Athlete Development LLC
34:43 The one thing the kids who stayed had in common
36:09 A year of three-hour nine-hole rounds
38:08 The drive to Pinehurst, and the flip that became Operation 36
40:08 Teaching calculus to a seventh grader
42:01 Narrative, and the data nobody else in golf has
44:16 One in four: this is not a junior golf story anymore
45:42 Bootstrapping, licensing, and taking the junior out of the brand
49:15 Shrinking the variables until clarity becomes motivation
51:06 Competence, relatedness, autonomy
52:40 The women who never had permission to start close
55:33 The cultural headwind: America starts on the range
57:05 Aligning a club top to bottom, and Op36 at St Andrews
1:02:41 The ego of the young coach, and a $400-a-month membership
1:05:25 A gymnastics gym on every corner, and not a golf program
1:08:55 What a club needs before this works
1:12:23 If a recession comes, which programs survive
1:15:46 Opening the app in 2027: couch to course, course to coach
1:18:22 Golf Genius, and learning to run an engineering team
1:24:56 One thing you can do to make somebody's first nine better
1:31:07 Close: reviews, Titleist AIM Enhanced, and thanks
What is NewClub?
Founded in 2017, NewClub is the premier private golf society in the United States. It blends the community and access of a private club with the variety and affordability of public golf. Members enjoy thousands of reserved tee times, competitions and events at exceptional partner courses across our local chapters, as well as signature trips and exclusive perks. NewClub is revolutionizing golf membership, making the game more meaningful for those who love it.
What is The Bag Drop?
The Bag Drop<...
