Ed Heil
You’ve heard this conversation at CMAA chapter meetings and in Boardroom Magazine: Private club members are getting younger, the waitlist boom won't last forever, and clubs need to figure out how to appeal to the next generation before it's too late. That's not a new idea, right?
But there's a second shift happening alongside the membership transition, and this one is getting far less attention. The people running clubs are changing too, which only makes sense. According to Dr. Rod Warnick, who has spent more than 40 years studying hospitality trends and training the next generation of club leaders at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that shift may be just as significant as anything happening on the membership side.
A Different Kind of Member
Let’s start with the membership conversation to level set. Warnick has watched the private club evolve from a status symbol into something that is harder to define and yet still familiar.
"It's not my grandfather's club anymore," he said. "It is not just a traditional club where you become a member and you play golf. It's more of a lifestyle type of thing."
That shift to a “lifestyle type of thing” has been brewing for years, and younger members are accelerating it. It wasn’t long ago that the older generations (ie. Baby Boomers and older Gen X) joined a club to be seen, and make a statement about who they were and how far they’ve come. Today, younger members are joining for different reasons. They want to belong somewhere. They want experiences, community, and a place that fits the life they're building. This is the part that’s familiar - people have always valued the idea of belonging to a group of people who share values and beliefs. But the coveted 42-year old member today is more concerned about experiences and community that includes their family. That hasn’t always been the case.
"It's becoming a third place," Warnick explained, "a destination where I form all of my memories — birthdays, weddings, significant events. It becomes part of who I am."
That's a fundamentally different value proposition than what clubs were originally built around. The clubs that are thriving today have figured out how to deliver value to this new member. The Jonathan Club, Warnick noted, recruits three to four hundred new members a year, driven largely by a community of young entrepreneurs who are looking for exactly this kind of environment. Both the Jonathan Club, in Los Angeles, and the New York Athletic Club, he said, are sold out.
The appeal has shifted from exclusivity to engagement. "It's not just status," Warnick said. "It's being relevant. It's having the new things that people want to do."
That means pickleball courts and wellness centers and golf simulators that create a social experience rather than just a practice session on the range. It means daycare and family programming and, in the case of Chevy Chase Club, converting a parking lot into an ice rink each winter that draws families from three in the afternoon until well into the evening. It means thinking about intergenerational programming and experiences that bring different generations together deliberately.
The clubs getting this right are finding creative ways to bring tradition and innovation together for members who want the same things, regardless of age. Community and shared experiences.
A Different Kind of Leader
On a parallel path is the evolution of the private club general manager. For decades, the path to becoming a club general manager ran through food and beverage, through the golf shop, or turf management. The GM was someone who had worked their way up through the operational side of the club. But Warnick says that profile is changing faster than most people realize.
Warnick's club management course at UMass draws students from across the business school: finance, accounting, operations management, sports management, technology, nutrition and communications. Students who, not long ago, would have defaulted to Wall Street or a corporate accounting firm are now discovering that a career in private club management offers something those paths don't - a chance to run a real community, with real complexity, in an environment most people would envy.
"It's a finance student. It's a sports management student. It's an accounting student. It's an operations management student. It's a person who knows technology," Warnick said, describing the students now sitting in his classroom. "A much, much more diverse group who are coming in with a much more varied background."
He's placed students in professional roles around the country for years. These days he has finance students who initially had their sights set on Wall Street pivot into club careers. Some of these people include prospective CFOs who discovered that the financial complexity of running a private club is every bit as rigorous as what they'd find in a corporate setting.
The modern general manager faces a job that looks nothing like it did twenty years ago. Heck, their titles have even evolved to COO. They're leading diverse teams, navigating demanding boards, managing complex finances, deploying technology, and building experiences that appeal to members across multiple generations all at once. The old path into the role didn't necessarily prepare someone for these challenges. The new one might.
"You've got to think critically about how a general manager works in a private club setting," Warnick said. "It's not necessarily just the bottom line."
That's not a dismissal of financial discipline, it's a recognition that the best club leaders understand the difference between running a business and running a private club. They now understand that to do this job well, they must understand club finances and how to manage a team of people in a luxury setting.
Warnick is also building leadership skills into the curriculum explicitly. He’s doing this through mentorship programs that pair students with young professionals just a year or two out of school, leadership academies at hospitality venues across the industry, and case studies that put students face-to-face with some of the toughest challenges a GM will encounter, including the board dynamics that have derailed more than a few promising careers.
"When you're a general manager at a private club," he noted, "you could have four or five hundred bosses."
According to Warnick, the people entering the field right now are being trained to handle it.
Two Shifts, One Moment
The private club industry is navigating a generational transition on two fronts simultaneously. The members are younger, and their expectations are different. The leaders are younger too, and they're coming in with business backgrounds that the industry has never really seen before.
Neither shift is happening overnight. Legacy members and veteran GMs aren't disappearing, and the tension between tradition and innovation isn't going away. But the pipeline of talent Warnick sees at UMass suggests the clubs that are paying attention have more to work with than they ever had in the past.
