Entering The Zone
Players look for an edge to help them play better. Golf is at least 80 percent mental once you have learned the basics. Unlike reactive sports, in golf you have plenty of time between shots to overthink, over-analyze, get scared, or scold yourself for the last putt you missed. Today, amateur and professional golfers seek the advice of sport psychologists in addition to coaches or instructors. Sports psychology focuses on...
Marking A Major Milestone
If we take a walk down memory lane back to the year 1989, golf was quite a different game than it is today. Wooden drivers were still used by the majority of players, balata balls were the choice of expert golfers, and virtually no golf teachers had been adequately trained in teaching the game to the very people to whom they were charging good money for lessons. The latter changed permanently in September of that year, when an entity...
President’s Message
As the front cover suggests, 2014 marks the USGTF’s 25th anniversary! One of the things that I’m most proud of is having taken the golf teaching profession and making it a separate entity unto itself. This certainly needed to be done, because the golf teaching profession was too important to the game to have been ignored. Of course, the other thing I am proud of is having provided over 30,000 people worldwide the opportunity to teach...
What’s Logical May Not Always Be Practical
The golf industry as a whole owes a great deal to the golf teaching professional. I say this because it is the golf teaching professional who has the unique opportunity to influence the golfer’s ultimate future in the game. We are the ones who can turn frowns into smiles, mend fragile egos, and inject our clients with a passion for the game that can last a lifetime. That being said, perhaps we should lobby the industry for an annual...
Tale of the Four Cups
According to Dr. Joseph Parent, author of Zen Golf, when it comes to learning, there are generally four traits that people exhibit. The analogy he uses is quite interesting in that it allows us to define not only our student’s willingness to learn but also the category in which we can place ourselves as teaching professionals. Tale of the Four Cups 1. The upside down cup represents a student supposedly there to learn, but who simply...
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