Reay juniors serious about coaching

September 2009

Reay might be the UK’s wind capital but that has not discouraged a generation of young golfers learning the sport.
 
This month Reay Golf Club reported that, after 34 juniors joined this year, it had reached a high of 84 junior members and 72 of them come to the club for coaching on a regular basis.
 
So large is the interest from juniors that Jim Frew, the club’s first junior convenor in 1973, has literally been brought out of retirement to help the club’s four volunteer coaches cope with the surge.
 
“It was obvious this year the numbers were going to be quite big because people were making enquiries before we had advertised the start of the coaching,” said the enthusiastic 78 year old. 
 
“We had five coaches trained but when the coaching started and we had over 20 new juniors we didn’t know what had hit us. We had a recruitment drive and now have 9 qualified Level 1 coaches.”
 
As a former junior convenor (he held the post for just a year previously before injuring his back) Mr Frew is the ideal person to compare - and contrast - the type of junior coaching now on offer at the club through the national junior golf programme, clubgolf, to that which existed 36 years ago.
 
“In 1973 I used to ask members to come out and give a few lessons and our junior membership was about 26 then,” he said.
 
“Now, with qualified volunteer coaches trained through clubgolf it makes a huge difference. The format for teaching junior golf is excellent. You see children after a few weeks and half of them are swinging like Tiger Woods.”
 
clubgolf is the partnership between the Scottish Golf Union, the Scottish Ladies' Golfing Association, the Professional Golfers' Association, the Golf Foundation and sportscotland, launched after Scotland’s successful bid to host the 2014 Ryder Cup.
 
The interest in golf at the club is fuelled by a vast amount of work in Caithness schools where clubgolf’s introductory game, firstclubgolf, is a feature in most P4, 5, 6 & 7 classes.  The club’s Head Coach, Evan Sutherland’s commitment in these schools, where he supports teachers and Active Schools Co-ordinators, has been enormous.
 
Making golf so inclusive a sport has created an unusual, though unsurprising, demographic in the club – most of the new intake of children are from families that don’t play golf.
 
“We always had a base of juniors that were children of adult members but now most of our juniors had no connection with the club at all,” said Mr Frew.
 
“They started coming from the schools and they told their friends so more kept coming and this year the numbers have been quite exceptional. Most come from villages from as far away as Bettyhill and Tongue which is 40-odd miles from Thurso.”
 
With so many attending regular coaching, and the club’s new practice ground providing the ideal venue, performance levels amongst the juniors are accelerating.
 
“We separate the children by ability, not age. So somebody who’s 12 joins with a 5 year old and is in the same class,” said Mr Frew.
 
“The 12 year olds will see children of their age on Stage 2 or further and that makes them try even harder to improve.  Many of them are up to speed within a few weeks.”
 
“I reckon we’ve got nine and 10 year olds that should be trying for a senior handicap next year,” said Mr Frew. “There are three brothers, the Munros, that are really good. The oldest is on Stage 3 coaching and playing in senior competitions every week.  The middle brother, a 10 year old, went round our Open on 87 last week from junior tees.
 
“Yet they don’t have a golfer in the family.  The last one was their mother’s great uncle, Willie Gunn, who was for many years the champion of Wick.  The youngest brother, the nine year old, keeps talking about the great uncle and saying he wants to be like him.” 
 
A fringe benefit of more children playing golf is that some of their parents are becoming interested in playing the game.
 
“The parents could see the children were enjoying the game so they decided to give it a try,” said Mr Frew.  “So this summer Evan started a firstclubgolf course and we got 10 adults
 
“Evan used his coaching experience and developed an accelerated form of coaching and within four weeks we had six joining the club.”