Back
Spring forward, fall back and get your rounds in while you can.
Growing up in New England, the annual turning-back of the clocks was always a gut-punch to me as a young golfer. Even though it traditionally has happened at a time when the days are starting to get chilly and damp across the northern half of the country, the switch from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time always felt like an arbitrarily abrupt end to the golf season. Any chances to sneak out to the range or course after school would disappear around Halloween.
Most years, my part of the country would cling to some bonus mild weather for a couple of weeks past this hard deadline. It seemed a waste for the sun to be gone by 5:00 pm on a lagniappe 60-degree early-November afternoon. In those days, I would have been fully in favor of adopting what is currently making the rounds in Washington as the Sunshine Protection Act, which would eliminate the twice-yearly clock-change and install Daylight Saving Time as a rule across the United States.
We have been here before. This issue has come up several times over the decades, most notably starting in January of 1974, when the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act took effect as a response to 1973's oil crisis. But what was meant to be a 16-month trial period was unwound in late October of that year due to popular backlash against it.
Some 53 years later, Congress is back at it again, and the Sunshine Protection Act, introduced in early 2025 and passed by the House of Representatives in July of 2026, has plenty of supporters, including professional golf. Via a supportive letter to the president, President CEO Brian Rolapp expressed his organization's support, arguing in favor the Sunshine Protection Act based both on perceived benefits for televised golf coverage as well as a study conducted by the National Golf Course Owners that indicated a potential $1 billion boon for the golf industry from golfers playing more late-afternoon rounds at the time of year in question. The difference could be as large as a 23 million round bump nationwide, Rolapp wrote, due to a greater propensity among golfers to tee off late in the afternoon than early in the morning.
The bill remains stalled in the United States Senate, meaning that the vast majority of Americans can expect to turn their clocks back by one hour in the wee hours of November 1, 2026. On the bright side, it allows for a little extra trick-or-treating this Halloween. On the downside, it's the last chance for an early-evening round of golf until mid-March, 2027.
In the past, purely from a golf standpoint, I would have been 100% on board with adopting widespread Daylight Saving Time. The earliest sunsets where I'm from in Connecticut happen at a dispiriting 4:20 pm in early and mid-December. Pushing that out to 5:20 pm, even if it meant lifting latest-sunrise times to 8:00 am or so, would have been a trade I would make every time. I would have been happy to get ready for school with relative darkness outside if it meant feeling an extra hour of daylight after getting home.
Now I live in Florida, where the earliest sunset times are a full 66 minutes later in the early winter. The latest solstice-adjacent sunrises come in early January, peaking at 7:13 am. Shifting sunrise to 8:13 am in order to move sunsets from 5:45 to 6:45 pm feels a little less urgent. If it were up to me, I would still probably vote in favor of the Sunshine Protection Act, but with a little more geography-based ambivalence.
One coda to this debate is that two of America's most popular winter golf states would likely go unaffected by any change. Both Arizona and Hawaii remain on Standard Time year-round; their residents never change their clocks. Hawaii's proximity to the Equator means its sunrise and sunset times vary relatively little throughout the year. And while Arizona sees about two hours of variance on sunrises and sunsets, the Daylight Saving Time shift has always been perceived as at odds with its desert climate and its residents' life schedules. As a result, it toggles between two and three hours behind Eastern Time during the year. Undergoing a fall-back shift would throw Scottsdale's late-fall sunset times back as early as 4:30 pm, which would be a huge detriment to golfers.
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