How to Coach a Golf Team
Coaching a team that competes as individuals is often more an exercise in psychology than anything else. The nature of the job is determined by the level of golf you are coaching and whether it is high school or college. It is a job that sometimes requires ingenuity, particularly if your team is a bit under funded. Like all coaching, however, it can be enormously rewarding.
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Instructions
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Make the process of selecting your team one with a minimum of trauma. If possible, have alternatives available for those who do not initially qualify as members of the team, such as a junior varsity or associates program for example.
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Network with the golf community regardless of what level you are coaching. Golf is an expensive sport and whatever support you can generate broadens the population of players from which you will draw your talent.
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Be honest about your ability to actually teach the game. If you are knowledgeable, understand the swing and have the credentials, instructing your team may be appropriate. If you are a good motivator, organizer, and people person but do not have the skills do teach the golf swing, you will be a much better golf coach by finding help with instruction.
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Make the process of how you plan to rank your team very transparent. If it's purely on a performance basis, let that be known. If other factors will be considered, let that also be known.
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Strike that elusive balance between pressure based motivation and having every one of your players go out knowing that you've placed a belt around their throat that will be cinched up with any failure.
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Think carefully about how you criticize performance. Sometimes the best observation can come after a moment of success, a reminder that improvement in a particular part of a player's game will assure him or her of further success.
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Do everything in your power to enhance the joy of simply playing, of being in the moment. It is an axiom that after a great round, almost all players will talk about "getting out of their own way." Great coaches find a way of enabling that ability.
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Tips & Warnings
One of college's most successful golf coaches listed his golf team as having seven more members than the number of those who would routinely participate in dual matches or larger tournaments. Every week, the bottom eight members of the team would play off for the chance to participate in the next match. He found that this system generated a tremendous amount of enthusiasm on the entire team. He also found that every two or three years a sleeper would emerge from the ranks of the "Monday qualifiers," as his eight called themselves, who would go on to become a regular member of the team.
Wiggle room around a purely performance based ranking system can be of value. Every golfer has slumps and a system that assures players that they cannot drop off the face of the earth with a bad week or two is a reassuring buffer.
At a higher level college program, most of the players will have their own instructors. Developing a working relationship with these instructors is crucial so that you do not work at cross purposes.
