Opinion & Analysis

The Kids Are Alright: Spike in Junior Golf Participation a Good Sign for Game’s Future

Published

8 years ago

Nov 16, 2017

This week, eight 10-player All-Star teams representing regions from across the country will converge upon Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz., to compete in the 6th PGA Junior League Championship.

The teams – New Hampshire (Northeast), California (West), Georgia (Southeast), Ohio (Mideast), Illinois (Midwest), New Jersey (Mid-Atlantic), Arkansas (Mississippi Valley), and Texas (Southwest) – will be divided into two divisions where they will face off in round-robin, 9-hole matches using a two-person, scramble format of play. Teams are captained by PGA/LPGA Professionals.

Since the PGA of America launched PGA Junior League in 2012, participation has skyrocketed from about 1,800 players the first year to a record-setting 42,000 boys and girls age 13 and under participating on 3,400 teams across the country this year.

“Junior golf is a key priority of the PGA of America and we recognize that increasing youth participation in the game is essential to the future of our industry and sport,” said Suzy Whaley, PGA of America Vice President and PGA Director of Instruction at Suzy Whaley Golf in Connecticut.

“PGA Jr. League is a fun and welcoming opportunity for boys and girls of all backgrounds and skill levels to learn, play, and love golf under the expert instruction and guidance of PGA and LPGA Professionals. It’s team-oriented and kids wear numbered jerseys. It’s transforming traditional junior golf and the numbers prove it.”

Whaley believes the team concept and scramble format are major factors in PGA Jr. League’s rapid growth over the last five years. In fact, she says, the program is re-shaping the golf industry’s view of the way junior golf is typically learned and played.

“Other youth sports have been utilizing the team format for years and it’s a natural fit for golf,” said Whaley, who has taken three teams to the Jr. League Championships. “The scramble format provides for a low-pressure environment. We’ve created a team atmosphere that has broad appeal. Parents and kids enjoy being a part of the community that PGA/LPGA Professional Captains create. In this team setting, older, more experienced players mentor the younger, beginner golfers. There’s no pressure on any one player, and it’s great to see kids pull for one another versus the individual focus generally associated with golf.”

“It is a program that creates a family-centered atmosphere that encourages mom, dad, brothers, sisters, and grandparents to become involved, as well. During PGA Jr. League matches, the parents are part of the match keeping score, posting photos on social media and encouraging all players. PGA Jr. League grows lifetime interest in the game across multiple generations.”

Matthew Doyle of the Connecticut team gathers for a photo with team captain, Suzy Whaley during session three for the 2016 PGA jr. League Golf Championship presented by National Rental Car held at Grayhawk Golf Club on November 20, 2016 in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Photo by Traci Edwards/PGA of America)

Fourteen-year-old Cullen Laberge from Farmington, Conn., is a student in the Suzy Whaley Golf program and has competed at the PGA Jr. League Championships for Team Connecticut. Laberge has been playing for four years and says his Jr. League experience really sparked his interest in the game and his desire to become a better player and ultimately a golf teacher one day.

“It has taught me so much about golf, while keeping it fun and interesting,” Laberge said. “The thing I enjoy the most is playing competitive golf without the stress that tournament golf can sometimes bring. No matter age or skill level, Jr. League keeps it fun and no matter how a player is playing there is another player to pick them up. That national championship was the best experience of my life. It was like I was playing on the PGA Tour. I loved the amazing competition; those players were good.”

And it’s not just golf’s executives and Jr. League participants who have taken notice of the program’s growth and the ultimate importance that growth represents for the future of the game. PGA and LPGA professionals including Rory McIlroy, Ricky Fowler, Lexi Thompson and Michelle Wie have all joined as ambassadors for the program.

“I want to do everything I can to be a positive influence on kids who are interested in the game and serving as an ambassador for PGA Jr. League is a great fit,” said Wie. “There are so many lessons that kids can learn and that adults can reinforce through the game of golf – good sportsmanship, honesty, integrity, work ethic. Golf can help you learn how to react when things don’t go your way which I think is a really important skill to have in life.”

“Golf can definitely mirror life. You can work incredibly hard and still fall short, but how do you bounce back? How do you overcome a mistake or a bad break and still succeed? It’s important for kids to grow up with a good work ethic and the right attitude to face challenges. Golf is a great game to teach those lessons.”

Wie says the more inclusive and welcoming the golf community in general can be, the better.

“Especially as a young female, I have experienced plenty of times where I did not feel welcome or felt like I had to prove myself more than the guys did,” Wie said. “Golf is a game that should be available to everyone and I think it’s important to make it accessible to kids whether they are a future tour pro or a future 20-handicapper.”

The folks over at the USGA know a thing or two about growing the game and making it more accessible and they should, they’ve been doing it since the association’s founding in 1894.

The inaugural three USGA championships – the U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur and U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1895 – did not have age limits, each simply aiming to identify the champion golfer. In 1948, the USGA held the first United States Junior Amateur solely open to players under the age of 18 and just one year later the association conducted the first United States Girls’ Junior Championship.

In addition to helping fund The First Tee, LPGA-USGA Girls Golf, and the Drive, Chip and Putt Championships, the USGA recently introduced its “For the Good of the Game” grant program to promote a more welcoming and accessible game at the local level with millions of dollars offered to local communities to build programs.

“The greatest misperception is accessibility,” says Beth Major, Director of Community Outreach at the USGA. “Two-thirds of all golf courses in America are open to the public. Kids and parents still believe it is a country club sport and we need to change that.”

Founded in 2013 as a joint initiative between the USGA, the Masters Tournament, and the PGA of America, the Drive, Chip and Putt Championship is a free nationwide junior golf competition for boys and girls ages 7-15 aimed at growing the game. Participants who advance through local, sub-regional and regional qualifying earn a place in the National Finals, which is conducted the Sunday before The Masters at Augusta National Golf Club.

Drive, Chip and Putt qualifying is offered in all 50 states and participation in the event has increased each year.

“We have a great partnership with our friends at the PGA of America and the Masters Tournament,” Major said. “Our leaders realized that by pooling our resources at the national level while activating at the local level, we could quickly scale the program and get more kids involved.”

“Going into our sixth year, it is amazing to see how far the program has grown and the entry point we’ve created together to keep our youth engaged. We look forward to continuing to evolve the program to welcome more youth to the sport.”

The USGA, in partnership with the LPGA, the Masters Tournament, the PGA of America, and the PGA TOUR, founded The First Tee in 1997 specifically to answer the call for diversity and inclusion. The program has welcomed millions of new players to the game in the past 20 years by focusing not only on teaching golf skills but life and social skills such as etiquette, honesty, respect, confidence and responsibility.

Founded in 1989, the LPGA-USGA Girls Golf program is aimed at girls ages 6-17 and has played a critical role in not only welcoming girls and women to the game, but perhaps equally importantly keeping them in the game.

“Statistics continually show us that the social aspects of the game drive girls and women to play golf,” Major said. “That sense of camaraderie and building friends greatly outweighs their need to compete at the entry level. LPGA-USGA Girls Golf, quite simply, has made it fun and cool for girls to play – and play together. And the results are astounding. We have traced more than 100 girls who started in an LPGA-USGA Girls Golf program that played in a USGA championship last year. They have not only introduced the game to girls and young women, they kept them in the game, and that is very exciting and inspiring.”

One company is tackling growth of the game from another angle – the equipment side.

Since its very beginning back in 1997, U.S. Kids Golf has been focused on its mission, “To help kids have fun learning the lifelong game of golf and to encourage family interaction that builds lasting memories.”

To that end, the company began developing youth clubs starting out with just three sizes and one product line initially.

“Over time, through watching youth golfers, we came to realize that we were not serving them as well as we would like,” said Dan Van Horn, U.S. Kids Golf founder. “Looking at how the best players in the world – LPGA and PGA Tour – are fit for clubs, we discovered the proportion of their drive length to height was from 60-70 percent. From that we created what we term the ‘2/3 solution.’ Simply put, for every 3 inches a player grows, we offer a set that has a driver that is 2 inches longer.”

Importantly, it is not just the length of the clubs that increase as the player grows but also the overall club weight, grip size and shaft stiffness. At the same time, the loft on woods decreases providing additional distance.

“One of the key benefits of correctly fit clubs that are lightweight is the ability for players to learn a correct and powerful swing at a young age,” Van Horn said. “Clubs that are too long and/or heavy slows the golf swing itself and creates bad habits that are difficult to change later in life.”

Beyond the importance of young golfers needing properly fit equipment, Van Horn believes strongly in the need for juniors to compete in tournament play to facilitate aspirational goals and to measure progress. Going hand in hand with this is proper instruction from coaches who understand how young players learn and develop.

“After a few years of producing equipment, we realized more needed to be done to serve our market so we formed a nonprofit foundation,” Van Horn said. “Immediately we created our World Championship in 2000 so that young golfers would have an aspirational goal, much like the Little League World Series is to baseball players. We also realized that golf professionals and coaches lacked an organized incentive-based learning program to truly engage players in the game so we created one that same year.”

A longtime proponent of having players play from appropriate yardages, U.S. Kids Golf developed the Longleaf Tee System which uses a mathematical formula to “scale” any golf course for up to eight different tee locations per hole so all players have options based upon how far they carry the ball with a driver. Yardages start at 3,200 yards for 18 holes and increase up to Tour distances of 7,400 yards.

“What we need is a focus by all golf facilities and coaches to provide quality, enjoyable experiences to our youth,” Van Horn said. “This means incorporating game-based learning with a measurable, learning program so that players and their parents know how they are progressing. And, of course, shorter tees need to be available so we can get kids on a ‘field’ that fits them like other sports. There’s no question it can be done.”

The National Golf Foundation’s annual report for 2016 revealed that participation in junior golf programs remained steady at 2.9 million likely due in part to the success of the programs mentioned above and others just like them. Importantly, the number of female junior golfers has increased to a third of all participants and the number of non-Caucasion players has risen to a quarter, four times what it was a couple of decades ago.

While time will ultimately judge whether these programs and offerings serve not only to retain current players but continue to attract new ones, the state of junior golf in the country appears strong and on the right track for now.

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Opinion & Analysis

The 2 primary challenges golf equipment companies face

Published

4 weeks ago

Jul 30, 2025

Ben Alberstadt

As the editor-in-chief of this website and an observer of the GolfWRX forums and other online golf equipment discourse for over a decade, I’m pretty well attuned to the grunts and grumbles of a significant portion of the golf equipment purchasing spectrum. And before you accuse me of lording above all in some digital ivory tower, I’d like to offer that I worked at golf courses (public and private) for years prior to picking up my pen, so I’m well-versed in the non-degenerate golf equipment consumers out there. I touched (green)grass (retail)!

Complaints about the ills of and related to the OEMs usually follow some version of: Product cycles are too short for real innovation, tour equipment isn’t the same as retail (which is largely not true, by the way), too much is invested in marketing and not enough in R&D, top staffer X hasn’t even put the new driver in play, so it’s obviously not superior to the previous generation, prices are too high, and on and on.

Without digging into the merits of any of these claims, which I believe are mostly red herrings, I’d like to bring into view of our rangefinder what I believe to be the two primary difficulties golf equipment companies face.

One: As Terry Koehler, back when he was the CEO of Ben Hogan, told me at the time of the Ft Worth irons launch, if you can’t regularly hit the golf ball in a coin-sized area in the middle of the face, there’s not a ton that iron technology can do for you. Now, this is less true now with respect to irons than when he said it, and is less and less true by degrees as the clubs get larger (utilities, fairways, hybrids, drivers), but there remains a great deal of golf equipment truth in that statement. Think about it — which is to say, in TL;DR fashion, get lessons from a qualified instructor who will teach you about the fundamentals of repeatable impact and how the golf swing works, not just offer band-aid fixes. If you can’t repeatably deliver the golf club to the golf ball in something resembling the manner it was designed for, how can you expect to be getting the most out of the club — put another way, the maximum value from your investment?

Similarly, game improvement equipment can only improve your game if you game it. In other words, get fit for the clubs you ought to be playing rather than filling the bag with the ones you wish you could hit or used to be able to hit. Of course, don’t do this if you don’t care about performance and just want to hit a forged blade while playing off an 18 handicap. That’s absolutely fine. There were plenty of members in clubs back in the day playing Hogan Apex or Mizuno MP-32 irons who had no business doing so from a ballstriking standpoint, but they enjoyed their look, feel, and complementary qualities to their Gatsby hats and cashmere sweaters. Do what brings you a measure of joy in this maddening game.

Now, the second issue. This is not a plea for non-conforming equipment; rather, it is a statement of fact. USGA/R&A limits on every facet of golf equipment are detrimental to golf equipment manufacturers. Sure, you know this, but do you think about it as it applies to almost every element of equipment? A 500cc driver would be inherently more forgiving than a 460cc, as one with a COR measurement in excess of 0.83. 50-inch shafts. Box grooves. And on and on.

Would fewer regulations be objectively bad for the game? Would this erode its soul? Fortunately, that’s beside the point of this exercise, which is merely to point out the facts. The fact, in this case, is that equipment restrictions and regulations are the slaughterbench of an abundance of innovation in the golf equipment space. Is this for the best? Well, now I’ve asked the question twice and might as well give a partial response, I guess my answer to that would be, “It depends on what type of golf you’re playing and who you’re playing it with.”

For my part, I don’t mind embarrassing myself with vintage blades and persimmons chasing after the quasi-spiritual elevation of a well-struck shot, but that’s just me. Plenty of folks don’t give a damn if their grooves are conforming. Plenty of folks think the folks in Liberty Corner ought to add a prison to the museum for such offences. And those are just a few of the considerations for the amateur game — which doesn’t get inside the gallery ropes of the pro game…

Different strokes in the game of golf, in my humble opinion.

Anyway, I believe equipment company engineers are genuinely trying to build better equipment year over year. The marketing departments are trying to find ways to make this equipment appeal to the broadest segment of the golf market possible. All of this against (1) the backdrop of — at least for now — firm product cycles. And golfers who, with their ~15 average handicap (men), for the most part, are not striping the golf ball like Tiger in his prime and seem to have less and less time year over year to practice and improve. (2) Regulations that massively restrict what they’re able to do…

That’s the landscape as I see it and the real headwinds for golf equipment companies. No doubt, there’s more I haven’t considered, but I think the previous is a better — and better faith — point of departure when formulating any serious commentary on the golf equipment world than some of the more cynical and conspiratorial takes I hear.

Agree? Disagree? Think I’m worthy of an Adam Hadwin-esque security guard tackle? Let me know in the comments.

@golfoncbs The infamous Adam Hadwin tackle ? #golf #fyp #canada #pgatour #adamhadwin ? Ghibli-style nostalgic waltz – MaSssuguMusic

Podcasts

Fore Love of Golf: Introducing a new club concept

Published

1 month ago

Jul 22, 2025

GolfWRX Staff

Episode #16 brings us Cliff McKinney. Cliff is the founder of Old Charlie Golf Club, a new club, and concept, to be built in the Florida panhandle. The model is quite interesting and aims to make great, private golf more affordable. We hope you enjoy the show!

GolfWRX · Fore Love of Golf: Cliff McKinney – Old Charlie Golf Club

Opinion & Analysis

On Scottie Scheffler wondering ‘What’s the point of winning?’

Published

1 month ago

Jul 22, 2025

Jaacob Bowden, PGA

Last week, I came across a reel from BBC Sport on Instagram featuring Scottie Scheffler speaking to the media ahead of The Open at Royal Portrush. In it, he shared that he often wonders what the point is of wanting to win tournaments so badly — especially when he knows, deep down, that it doesn’t lead to a truly fulfilling life.

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“Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf? Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it because I’ve literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport,” Scheffler said. “To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world, because what’s the point?”

Ironically — or perhaps perfectly — he went on to win the claret jug.

That question — what’s the point of winning? — cuts straight to the heart of the human journey.

As someone who’s spent over two decades in the trenches of professional golf, and in deep study of the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the game, I see Scottie’s inner conflict as a sign of soul evolution in motion.

I came to golf late. I wasn’t a junior standout or college All-American. At 27, I left a steady corporate job to see if I could be on the PGA Tour starting as a 14-handicap, average-length hitter. Over the years, my journey has been defined less by trophies and more by the relentless effort to navigate the deeply inequitable and gated system of professional golf — an effort that ultimately turned inward and helped me evolve as both a golfer and a person.

One perspective that helped me make sense of this inner dissonance around competition and our culture’s tendency to overvalue winning is the idea of soul evolution.

The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies has done extensive research on reincarnation, and Netflix’s Surviving Death (Episode 6) explores the topic, too. Whether you take it literally or metaphorically, the idea that we’re on a long arc of growth — from beginner to sage elder — offers a profound perspective.

If you accept the premise literally, then terms like “young soul” and “old soul” start to hold meaning. However, even if we set the word “soul” aside, it’s easy to see that different levels of life experience produce different worldviews.

Newer souls — or people in earlier stages of their development — may be curious and kind but still lack discernment or depth. There is a naivety, and they don’t yet question as deeply, tending to see things in black and white, partly because certainty feels safer than confronting the unknown.

As we gain more experience, we begin to experiment. We test limits. We chase extreme external goals — sometimes at the expense of health, relationships, or inner peace — still operating from hunger, ambition, and the fragility of the ego.

It’s a necessary stage, but often a turbulent and unfulfilling one.

David Duval fell off the map after reaching World No. 1. Bubba Watson had his own “Is this it?” moment with his caddie, Ted Scott, after winning the Masters.

In Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, reflecting on his 2011 Super Bowl win, Rodgers said:

“Now I’ve accomplished the only thing that I really, really wanted to do in my life. Now what? I was like, ‘Did I aim at the wrong thing? Did I spend too much time thinking about stuff that ultimately doesn’t give you true happiness?’”

Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

Eventually, though, something shifts.

We begin to see in shades of gray. Winning, dominating, accumulating—these pursuits lose their shine. The rewards feel more fleeting. Living in a constant state of fight-or-flight makes us feel alive, yes, but not happy and joyful.

Compassion begins to replace ambition. Love, presence, and gratitude become more fulfilling than status, profits, or trophies. We crave balance over burnout. Collaboration over competition. Meaning over metrics.

Interestingly, if we zoom out, we can apply this same model to nations and cultures. Countries, like people, have a collective “soul stage” made up of the individuals within them.

Take the United States, for example. I’d place it as a mid-level soul: highly competitive and deeply driven, but still learning emotional maturity. Still uncomfortable with nuance. Still believing that more is always better. Despite its global wins, the U.S. currently ranks just 23rd in happiness (as of 2025). You might liken it to a gifted teenager—bold, eager, and ambitious, but angsty and still figuring out how to live well and in balance. As much as a parent wants to protect their child, sometimes the child has to make their own mistakes to truly grow.

So when Scottie Scheffler wonders what the point of winning is, I don’t see someone losing strength.

I see someone evolving.

He’s beginning to look beyond the leaderboard. Beyond metrics of success that carry a lower vibration. And yet, in a poetic twist, Scheffler did go on to win The Open. But that only reinforces the point: even at the pinnacle, the question remains. And if more of us in the golf and sports world — and in U.S. culture at large — started asking similar questions, we might discover that the more meaningful trophy isn’t about accumulating or beating others at all costs.

It’s about awakening and evolving to something more than winning could ever promise.