Golf Academy

We had a rare weekend where neither Joshua or Brandon was at their respective football clubs. Therefore I used the opportunity to open another door for them and decided to take them both to a Junior Golf Academy over at the Belvedere driving range. This entailed an hour long lesson with a golf instructor called Shan where both boys worked together taking it in turns. Essentially Shan worked in four things with the boys:

 

1. He had both boys swing the club with a conventional right hand grip and then with the hands the opposite way around. The idea behind this was to give the boys two options on how to hold a club and then for them to figure out which way works best. It is a clever teaching technique where you give the child various options and then they explore those options and work out what is best for them without you dictating how to do it.
2. The second thing was that both boys were moving their feet with every golf swing. Shan came up with a very simple solution to this which was to put a golf ball on the outside of each foot. Then as the boys swang the club they were not allowed to knock one of the balls, thus forcing them to keep their feet planted.
3. Thirdly the boys were often looking either at me, their coach or somewhere down the driving range. So the instructor was drilling in to them that they had to keep their eyes on the ball.
4. Finally the instructor was encouraging them to do a full swing of the club. Joshua in particular was frequently just doing little half swings and subsequently the ball was not really going up in the air. As soon as he started getting Joshua to do full swings, amazingly he was getting some reasonable loft on the club.

Overall both boys really enjoyed themselves and I ended up buying Brandon a little junior pitch wedge of his own. Joshua has now asked for a junior golf set for his birthday next month. The only problem I have now is that the golf academy runs at the same time as both their football clubs! The other problem is that with the boys getting professional coaching at such a young age and making such improvements after just one lesson - it wont be long before they are putting me to shame on a golf course. One of my dreams for later in life is that as the boys get older or even leave home, I would love for them to call up their old Dad on the odd free Sunday for a round of golf. Even before this happens it would be great father/son time to spend 4 hours out playing a round at the weekend and giving Tina time to chill at home.