THERE are certain times of the year when there is so much bleak, negative news floating around about golf that I occasionally trot off to the nearest cemetery and read a variety of sombre tombstone engravings just to raise the morale.

It’s almost got to the point where we've become so conditioned to grim tidings that if I switched on the television and saw a report saying every golf course in the country had been forced to close, accompanied by footage of sobbing workmen bulldozing clubhouses into shattered, twisted heaps, I'd just shrug my shoulders and say: "Aye well, it's probably for the best."

Of course, for every doom-laden statistic that ghoulishly flags up declining memberships here or drop offs in participation there, there are plenty of sprightly figures to illuminate encouraging spikes in interest elsewhere.

Cowglen Golf Club on Glasgow’s southside, for instance, has welcomed in 150 new members in a year while the numbers joining in the 18 to 29 age bracket has spurted from 15 to over 70.

At other clubs throughout the country, there is plenty of good, profitable work being done to adapt, diversify and innovate in these testing times where, by some accounts, the outlook is as gloomy as a forecast of tightly packed isobars delivered by the foreboding voice of Vincent Price.

As documented elsewhere in this sports section today, the high heid yins at Scottish Golf, the amateur game’s governing body, are continuing to urge its member clubs to embrace a variety of proposals in an effort to bolster finances in this period of cut-backs and reductions.

At the vanguard of this strategy is an all-singing, all-dancing Customer Relationship Management system which, among other things, will provide an integrated national tee-time booking platform for all Scottish Golf’s affiliated clubs and, in theory, open up new revenue streams that can be ploughed back into the game here at all levels.

This roll-out of high-tech gadgetry obviously has to be funded and that will mean raising the annual subscription fee that every adult member pays from £11.25, the second lowest in Europe, to, possibly, £20 or £25.

A vote will be taken on the whole issue later this year but getting people to make melodious noises off the same hymn sheet in this game has always been a tricky task.

Self-interest and self-preservation, as well as an ‘it’s aye been’ mentality and a grim resistance to change, are often so entrenched they can only be shifted through the process of fracking.

Blane Dodds, the chief executive of Scottish Golf, is hoping a sense of the “greater good” for golf in Scotland as a whole will shine through but will, for instance, those buoyant, money-soaked establishments like a Royal Troon, a Royal Dornoch or a Prestwick, with long-established visitor booking systems of their own, be willing to come on board and share a communal pot with a hand-to-mouth municipal? We will see.

Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands are still playing golf in this country but trying to entice those nomadic golfers to take up memberships is very much an exercise in going against the tide of trends.

Some 89 per cent of golf club members in Scotland are over 34 years of age while the proportion of female members is a pitiful 14 per cent and one of the lowest in Europe.

These are hardly earth-shattering statistics, of course. Back in the boom times, golf could afford to be complacent and would muddle on in the same direction without peering into the future and moving forward with any great sense of outward-looking purpose.

In many places, juniors were treated with finger-wagging contempt. Equally, women were banished into the margins. These old attitudes of sneering hostility continue to come home to roost in an age when the wider leisure market place is vast and varied.

When it comes to governing bodies, it's often a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't. We've already had amalgamation. Now, let's hope golf can continue to move forward with more joined-up thinking.

AND ANOTHER THING ...

According to one of my dear colleague’s statistical sleuthing, Connor Syme’s share of 12th place on his European Tour debut in the Portugal Masters at the weekend was the best by a Scottish professional since Gordon Brand Jnr shared third in the Tunisian Open back in 1982.

It was a fine effort by the young, level-headed Fifer who joined the paid ranks only last week.

Inevitably, social media moved through the hysterical gears in its plaudits but it’s important to keep it in perspective.

We are all eager for our next Scottish standard bearer to emerge but keeping a lid on fevered expectations is almost as tough as getting on to the tour in the first place.