Four years ago, when David Cavossa was still running a division of a defense contractor in northern Virginia, he was dining with Jacob Ward, a lifelong pal from Massachusetts who was running a trade association for app companies. Ward was extolling the concept of on-demand labor that was powering Uber as the car service was in the midst of rapid global expansion.
The conversation later turned to the friends’ shared passion for golf and their wistful interest in walking the course with a caddie, the way the sport always used to be before golf carts became ubiquitous.
“That was kind of the connection,” Cavossa recalled, “the aha moment where we went, ‘What if we took the Uber business model and applied it to the caddie trade?’”
The pair laughed, assuming someone else was already working on the idea for their ultimate benefit. Two years went by, however, and no such company arose. Feeling burned out by his day job, Cavossa decided he was ready for a change and took a buyout to start Looper, an app offering caddies on demand the way Uber hails riders.
Looper launched in the mid-Atlantic in 2015 and is available at more than 100 courses in California, Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia with broad expansion plans in the works.
What golf misses without caddies, Cavossa said, is a gateway for recruiting young people to the sport. What golfers miss without a caddie is the the virtue of a companion on the course who not only carries the bag but also helps finding the ball, getting yardage, raking bunkers, fixing divots, reading the green and cleaning clubs and balls.
“Caddie programs, for a lot of us, served as our entry way into the game of golf,” Cavossa said. “It’s how we got exposed to it, it’s how we learned the game, how we made money as teens, and that really doesn’t exist anymore. The game of golf is struggling as a result.”
The majority of Looper’s caddies — about 70 percent — are in the youth demographic, 14 to 20 years old.
Furthermore, walking the course provides exercise. “Golf used to be a sport,” Cavossa said, “and it’s kind of turned into an activity over the last 40 years.”
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Dennis Cone, the founder and CEO of the Professional Caddies Association, said he has observed a small uptick in caddie usage over the past two decades, though the market share is still no more than 20 percent in the U.S. Internationally, however, he said the majority of clubs in other countries still use caddies.
“If you have never played the game of golf with a caddie, you have never played the game,” Cone, a 2011 Caddie Hall of Fame inductee, wrote in an email.
In the old business model, caddies would show up in the morning and wait to be chosen for a round — an inefficient use of time and one that might prove fruitless if not enough caddie-wanting golfers showed up that day. Now, caddies can schedule their work and waste less time. Labor laws can complicate matters for courses wanting to classify caddies as independent contractors rather than employees, as well.
“It’s a cost, it’s a hassle, it’s a time commitment,” Cavossa said, explaining thee decline, “and there aren’t as many people today that want to take caddies out as there were 30 or 40 years ago, so it’s hard for a club to maintain a caddie program because there isn’t enough demand at any one course to warrant the program.”
Looper recruits, certifies, orients, schedules and pays all the caddies, who make anywhere from $25 to $80 per round (before tip). The company derives revenue from a booking fee, thereby the courses where it operates aren’t charged a dime.
“All the course has to do is allow it there,” Cavossa said, “and then we ask them for a little bit of help marketing the program to their members.”