By David Gould, Contributor, Golf Business
While some of us weren’t paying attention, junior golf promotion changed.
Programs and concepts for ushering kids into golf and retaining them as players got smarter, more nuanced and more efficient. At the same time, they extended their outreach considerably further into underserved communities.
Until fairly recently, there was a hit-and-hope mindset to junior promotion and a constant uphill battle against soccer, lacrosse and all the other team sports intent on signing kids up. Golf has justifiably called itself the game for a lifetime because playing it does not require running, jumping or making physical contact. When we’re young, however, we love to do those things.
A series of National Golf Foundation studies from the 20-teens showed how proactive golf needed to become in order to grab a spot on the busy sports schedules of school-age children. Forward-thinking instructors and program managers apparently took note, revising their golf intro sessions to make them dramatically less stiff and static.
“If you’re committed to the idea that a school-age child learning golf has to stand in one place the whole time, that’s a huge barrier to success,” says Kaycee Wilke, the director of Player and Youth Development for the Southern California Golf Association. “What’s been proven to work is game-based activity with an athletic warmup component, adding colorful props and creating an overall atmosphere of fun.” There’s a significant Titleist Performance Institute (TPI) component to the programming Wilke oversees—programming that earned the SCGA a 2022 NGCOA Player Development Award. “The idea is to turn kids into athletes who are proficient at golf, which was a non-traditional approach—but we’ve seen it take hold.”
Her fellow Californian in youth golf development, Matt Clay, was an early adopter of TPI-based thinking as an entry path for kids into golf. Clay, the general manager of the Del Mar Golf Center north of San Diego, was asked at one point how to position that mindset to the moms and dads of prospective young students.
“We play dodgeball and parents ask why—the new parents,” says Clay. “I tell them it teaches spatial awareness, proprioception, speed, agility and a strong rotational move of the torso.” That right there, folks, is hardcore golf-swing technique, athletic fundamental by athletic fundamental. Along with just plain making sense, it’s a persuasive form of coach-parent communication.
Experimentation of this nature has liberated the modern junior golfer and made the royal and ancient game seem like what it is—an actual sport. SNAG, which Wilke’s program includes at the 5- to 7-year-old level, brought in bright colors and made it almost impossible to whiff. Into the mix came US Kids Golf to disrupt the equipment facet of the youth golf market (adding a highly successful tournament network under its own brand). Operation36 pulled the beginning golfer—young kids included—all the way up to a spot just 25 feet from the hole, and said let’s make par from here, then follow that with pars from 50 feet, 100 feet, etc., all the way back to the regulation tees.
On the East Coast a golf professional with expertise in early childhood development, Kate Tempesta, successfully brought golf to children as young as age 3 through an invention of her own, Birdie Basics. On the West Coast a similarly creative pro named Trapper Perkins developed Tiny Tees—likewise a pathway into golf that could start as soon as your tiny golfer was out of diapers. Arriving to steal a march on those other team sports, PGA Junior League Golf was all about uniforms, camaraderie and golf as a social vehicle. The program’s success was pretty much immediate and has only continued on its upward path.
This surge of innovation, Op36 included, wasn’t merely a series of interesting wrinkles—it was downright essential to the movement beyond hit-and-hope.
“We were running junior golf camps the old way, putting everything we had into it, and losing players instead of increasing our numbers,” recalls Ryan Dailey of his early work in North Carolina with partner Matt Reagan. “It was either invent a whole new way of turning beginners into golfers or give up altogether.”
Among the trails blazed by Op36 on its highly experimental path was a data-rich approach that gave players and coaches constant tracking of engagement level and performance improvement. “What gets measured gets managed,” as the business axiom goes, and it’s true whether you’re building widgets or turning kids into golf enthusiasts.
Golf industry people are admirably candid about the pandemic’s immense positive impact on business activity. This is well and good, but it shouldn’t cause out-of-the-box thinking to go unrecognized and undervalued. New ideas and attitudes “have made golf mainstream for kids,” says Jason Sanchez, general manager of the 18-hole Maple Hill golf complex in Grandville, Michigan. “Kids are proud to be golfers now, and that’s a dramatic shift from how things used to be.”
The stats back that statement up: Reporting from the National Golf Foundation showed that 3.4 million juniors played golf on a regulation course in 2022, which was the most since 2006. The 900,000-player increase in junior turnout over the period 2020 through 2022 makes juniors the highest-performing Covid-era participation segment of all—and it stands as the most diverse, as well. Some 37 percent of today's juniors are girls—that is compared to 15 percent in 2000. More than 25 percent are non-Caucasian, a critical jump from two decades ago, when a mere 6 percent were minorities.
Like Kaycee Wilke, Sanchez has earned an NGCOA national award for junior player development. He shares a penchant for originality with the Reagan-Dailey team at Operation 36—in fact, his need to push the envelope displays an intensity all its own. Now age 44, he’s held a position of responsibility at Maple Hill for two decades. “Back when I started, our junior clinics were lousy,” he recalls. “The guys running them were grumpy-ranger types who didn’t want to be there. I had some ideas for how we could do better.”
The quality of his ideas can be measured in turnout and revenue. In 2023, Maple Hill took in $158,000 in sign up fees alone. The add-on spend was extremely significant, as one would expect, especially given what a retail powerhouse the Maple Hill golf shop (physical and online) has become under third-generation course owners Andy and Bob Kitchen. “Going back seven years, our junior program served 800 kids,” says Sanchez. “This year we got that number up to 1,450.” Not so long ago the program had 200 kids at its Pee Wee entry level, and now that segment numbers 700-plus.
Maple Hill needs personnel by the busload to run this junior operation, a circumstance that keeps Sanchez on the recruitment trail all year round. But the sport’s newly won coolness factor, and the whole proud-to-be-golfers phenomenon, makes staffing far more doable. Starting players young, as Pee Wees, leads to some of the junior golfers spending their entire childhoods at Maple Hill. They join the junior program as volunteers, then as paid staffers, and some of them “graduate to become shop assistants,” Jason adds.
Indeed, the initial surge in junior-promotion success at the facility came when a corps of high school and college girls were hired as counselors. “They created a ‘safe zone’ for grade-school and teen girls to try golf,” Jason says. “Moms would come up to me all the time and say their 10-year-old daughter loves this or that counselor. That one change to our operation put things on a new path.”
What came next was the development of a full-circle process, in which grade-schoolers who started out as newbie golf students would end up years later helping run things. In the case of Maple Hill, alumni are making it all the way to university campuses that feed the golf industry with highly trained graduates. “We’ve got five kids from our program who are either currently [in the Professional Golf Management program] at Ferris State University or they’re headed there next year,” says Sanchez, with unmistakable pride.
The camper-to-counselor track has been a fundamental part of other junior-promotion hotspots, including Cedar Crest Golf Course in South Dallas, Texas, under the guidance of golf professional Ira Molayo and community leader Dave Ridley. The staff Molayo supervises is primarily African-American, from the streets and neighborhoods surrounding the golf course—just as Molayo himself was. “What Cedar Crest and the I Am a Golfer program combine to do is impact 100 kids every year,” says Molayo, “from the 70-plus in our golf program, to the internships and jobs held down here by 14 young people, to our college scholarships in support of eight students.”
To see the game morph from an acquired taste that is difficult to acquire into something much more culturally mainstream is both a reward and a relief for its top junior promoters. As the Operation 36 founders discovered long ago, high dropout rates have been endemic to beginner programs, leading to the oft-heard phrase “leaky bucket” to describe the short-duration stays of so many new entrants. Kaycee Wilke of the SCGA puts a constant, intense effort into countering that phenomenon.
“What we do at SCGA Junior is quite unique in the golf space,” Wilke contends, “in that we go very ‘deep’ with our kids. Introducing kids to golf is just the beginning—we commit to serving every age and every skill level, so that a participant never has to leave the program.” To make that commitment is to confront course-access challenges not for the faint of heart, especially in the wake of the golf-participation catalyst called Covid. “It’s a huge issue for us, because we’re working with course operators who are running a business focused on weekend activity and our clientele—young kids—are available generally on weekends to participate.”
Wilke works closely with Los Angeles County and its director of community engagement, Jorge Badel, to secure needed assets. She cites American Golf Corporation as another loyal friend of her program and its constituencies. In the city of Norwalk, California, the Don Knabe Golf Center is “extremely junior-friendly,” says Wilke, to the point where “we have programming there seven days a week.” The county has policies in place that regulate fees for her kids, keeping them as low as $88 for eight weeks’ participation, with financial- assistance opportunities that can knock the fee down by as much as 90 percent.
In a previous era for junior golf outreach, criticism would often be aimed at programs that produced lots of competitive youngsters bound for the elite ranks and youth tournament circuits, as though this couldn’t happen unless it came at the expense of the general community. Today, leaders like Wilke and Sanchez view advanced skill development as natural and logical outgrowths of a well-run system that kids stay in throughout much of their childhood and youth.
“Our next step is to start a regional junior tour based here in Grand Rapids,” says Sanchez, resolutely. “There’s a need for one, and a clear demand for it, and no one else seems to want to do it.”
Wilke acknowledges the unintended consequences for junior development programs that seem to turn children into mini tour pros, but feels it can be mitigated against. “We emphasize the value of developing kids as athletes, with good fitness, along the way to them becoming golfers,” she says. “So, yeah, to see six-year-olds taking private golf lessons seems weird, and it can often lead to burnout, which is the exact opposite of our goal.”
Parents have to be educated against over-enthusiasm, she feels. That being said, today’s kids seem to be getting better at golf faster, partly due to technology and improved training practices. And if introducing underprivileged children to golf is a good idea in the first place, helping them reach their full potential in the game can hardly be mistaken thinking.
“We have an Advanced Player Program and we just launched a Junior Golf Assistance Fund,” Wilke says. “It gives grants to players to travel to tournaments, or to afford a trainer or swing coach. These are players with the talent but not the money to reach the performance levels you need to earn a Division 1 college golf scholarship, so we’re finding the money to solve for that.”
As these case studies and anecdotes reveal, innovation and push-the-envelope thinking haven’t simply taken junior development to new and lofty levels, they’ve also created some top-performing programs that are hard for the rank and file to keep up with. The hope is that disseminating best practices, plus further use of data to track success rates, will exert a spread-the-wealth effect and bring best-in-class programming to communities all across the map.
This article was featured in the November/December edition of Golf Business Magazine.