Mr. Rose said he was planning to use an expanded hole to reintroduce the game to his 5-year-old son, who rejected the game recently after he had tired of failing at it.

“Lately, I’ve been having a hard time getting him to pick up a club,” Mr. Rose said.

Another alternative is foot golf, in which players kick a soccer ball from the tee to an oversize hole, counting their kicks. Other changes relax the rules and allow do-over shots, or mulligans, once a hole; teeing up the ball for each shot; and throwing a ball out of a sand bunker once or twice a round.

Still other advocates of change have focused on adapting to the busy schedules of parents and families. In recent years, golf courses have encouraged people to think of golf in six-hole or nine-hole increments. Soon, about 30 golf courses across the country will become test cases for a system of punch-in-punch-out time clocks that assess a fee by the minutes spent playing or practicing rather than by 18- or 9-hole rounds.

The initiatives are being driven by disparate entities within the game, including the venerable P.G.A. of America, which represents more than 27,000 golf professionals. The organization has created an eclectic, 10-person task force to foster nontraditional pathways to golf. The task force has some golf insiders, but it also includes Arlen Kantarian, who led American tennis’s successful effort to reverse a decline in participation, and the Olympic ski champion Bode Miller, whose sport was revived by better equipment and cultural changes that tempered skiing’s reputation for stodgy elitism.

“Little League baseball is an example of how to introduce someone to a game with different equipment than the sophisticated players use,” Mr. Kantarian said. “We should also be thinking about unconventional golf on school fields or backyards. That might be the best way for kids and beginners to learn anyway.”