[Louthcoombutt]

I am the golf coach for my kids middle school team and every year we have the same issue: 20 kids come out for the team and 10 of them have never held a club before. I needed a way to get the kids hooked on golf earlier.

This year I convinced the school to adopt golf as part of the PE curriculum using the Starting New at Golf (SNAG) program.

SNAG is a modified golf game somewhere between lawn darts and real golf. The balls are like small tennis balls and the targets are covered with Velcro. There are two kinds of oversized clubs: rollers (putters) and launchers (wedges) that will send the ball 50 yards or so on a full swing. It can also be played in a gym which is great for our wet winters. The best part of SNAG however is the training equipment. Each skill (putting, chipping pitching and full swing) has a teaching tool that self reinforces the proper motion. For example: to teach full swing you use a club with a long ribbon that helps you visualize the swing plane and then cracks like a whip when the club is released properly.

I rounded up some sponsors to purchase the equipment (which ran about $2500 for everything needed for a K-8 school). The reports from the PE teacher were fantastic. Using the specialized teaching tools she was able to tech the kids proper setup, putting, chipping, pitching and full swing technique, and she doesn't even golf.

Yesterday I got the chance to try it out for myself and had a blast. The soft balls give you the very satisfying feeling of compressing them on impact which really helped my tempo. The best part was watching the kids have success very quickly.

The biggest problem teaching kids to golf is that the learning curve is so steep, they run out of patience before they start having fun. This was not a problem with SNAG. I could see it was working by the smiles in the gym. Now kids at our school will get the chance to golf starting in 1st grade! This summer we will see how well it transfers to real golf.

Check it out: http://www.snaggolf.com