I had no idea what thousands of golf balls looked like. I certainly couldn’t have guessed how they would make me feel. I used to marvel at the A-type friends who hoard boxes of fresh Pro-Vs in their golf closet and even feel a little jealousy for a gene I don’t possess. They’re golf’s version of doomsday preppers. Golf balls? Fully stocked. Gloves? A year’s worth.
But after ordering thousands of golf balls for our member referral game, I finally understood the impulse. Being in the presence of all those glistening white orbs made me feel both safe (“I’ll never run out of golf balls again”) and optimistic (“Any one of these could be used to shoot my best round”). Even if not a single member referred a friend, at least the golf-ball problem was solved. Loaded into a warehouse bay next to tens of thousands of tees, books, and various other golf goodies, they completed a picture of scale we never dreamed of in the early days.
The warehouse is the physical manifestation of what you’ve helped to create. Eight and a half years after the first issue went out to founding and charter subscribers, we now order by the ton, measure deliveries in shipping containers, and write checks to golf courses I never expected to set foot on, never mind bring 108 Broken Tee Society members along with me. It’s exhilarating and scary in equal measure.
We’re able to sign those checks and place those outsize purchase orders because your support has remained steadfast; because this membership has great taste, values quality, and pursues unforgettable experiences. You’ve made the investment in this idea, and our obligation is simple: match that investment with value, creativity, and an almost irrational obsession with quality. The incredibly high volume of annual renewals says something—not about us, but about what you value and how you choose to spend your time in the game. What once sounded radical—reader-supported instead of advertiser-supported, a media product worth paying for, member access to the world’s best golf courses—became normal only because you made it so.
We curated 41 official events this year, with a few more that stayed off the books. There were aces (11) and bogeys (too many). More importantly, thousands of memories and friendships were made. For many, getting to play in a BTS event at a bucket-list course is a dream realized. The team worked so hard to treat every one of those touchpoints accordingly—months of planning behind that first handshake, each tee time, each dinner, and each gift bag. These events don’t exist in isolation. They stack on top of one another, year after year, until the faces are familiar and we’re sharing these experiences with our friends.
This summer, we made the hard call to move our membership from Discord to our own app because the community deserved a space commensurate with its level of taste and built for how we actually interact. We spent nearly two years building Quiet, Please for our Premium members while still producing the quarterly book, weekly newsletters, the biweekly podcast, and crossing 10 million views on YouTube. We missed deadlines, botched rollouts, crashed the website, made mistakes, fixed them, and kept going.
The learning curve hasn’t flattened. The game continues to evolve, the landscape changes, and as time goes on the disruptor can easily be disrupted. That’s why we keep pushing. That’s why we’ll keep creating new products and offerings for the fanatics that this game breeds. You’ll see it in a few weeks with the second installment of the 2026 events calendar. You’ll see it in March when even more events are announced. You’ll see it in the summer when we unveil how our publishing philosophy and aesthetic ethos translate to what you wear on the course and at your club and wherever life takes you in between.
As long as this thing exists, we’ll keep trying to enrich your golf life and make it worthy of the people who choose to be part of it. I hope the start of another year as a Broken Tee Society member feels like opening a fresh sleeve of golf balls—filled with joy, optimism, and the promise of playing this beautiful game with the people we love.
Brendon Thomas
Founder, The Golfer’s Journal
