Kierland Concentrates On All Aspects of Golf

In a game in which bigger is better and difficult divine, the Kierland Golf Club in Scottsdale, Az., has admirably resisted the temptation to muscle up its 27 holes for the sake of reputation and instead concentrates on its target customers.

Located at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa, the Acacia, Ironwood and Mesquite nines offer a parkland setting with four sets of tee boxes, generous fairways and accessible greens, all features that appeal to a vacationing family, occasional corporate golfers or any other hotel guest seeking an enjoyable experience.
That doesn’t mean that Kierland is a walk in the parkland either, but it’s a delightful alternative for casual golfers to the many desert courses scattered throughout the Phoenix area and throughout Arizona that require powerful forced carries off the tee with desert pinching in to swallow golf balls.

There are more than 300 bunkers at Kierland, which also features lakes, dry desert washes and strands of trees on the gentle, rolling terrain that will often give you an uneven lie, but just as quickly return your ball to the fairway on a shot to one of the hills at the side of some holes.
With four sets of tees, you can make Kierland as pleasant or as difficult as you like as the Mesquite stretches between 2,465 and 3,478 yards, the Ironwood between 2,552 and 3,539 and the Acacia between 2,433 and 3,435.

“The golf course offers a challenge for the very good player, but a 30-handicapper or a corporate person who plays four times a year can go out there and have a good time,” said Mike LaBauve, a nationally renowned instructor who works out of the Kierland.

“There’s not a lot of forced carries, where you force somebody who’s on vacation to hit a ball and carry it 180 yards over a ravine. That’s not this place,” he said, adding that Jim Hardy, one of his teaching mentors and a golf course designer, has nothing but good things to say about Kierland from a design standpoint.

“Every time Jim comes here, and this is from a golf course architect, he goes, ‘You know what? This is a perfect resort golf course.’ People can come here and have a good time. They’re challenged, but at the same time, they can go out there and enjoy themselves and not get beat up,” said LaBauve.

It’s that playability that also makes the Kierland attractive to women whose skill levels haven’t reached the point of enjoying some of the other courses in the area, according to Sandy LaBauve who, like her husband, has been recognized for her teaching by a variety of national golf publications.
“We have a lot of target golf courses in Arizona, for sure,” she said. “They’re very, very beautiful. They’re very fun to play. They’re attractive. You look at them and you love the way they look.

“On the other hand, what that means for a female golfer is that you have got to have some reasonable distance and you’ve got to be able to carry the ball in the air.”

The accolades and honors showered upon the LaBauves over the years are too numerous to mention here, but Mike has been teacher of the year for the Southwest section of the PGA of America on three occasions and Sandy earned that title in 1998.

“I’ve been very lucky to have learned under some great instructors, Jim Hardy being the top of the list, but also Sandy’s dad, (1995 national PGA teacher of the year) Jack Lumpkin, was a huge influence on both of our careers,” said Mike, who has been teaching for 30 years.

Hardy, the 2007 PGA teacher of the year and author of “The Plane Truth for Golfers,” has for years conducted the Plane Truth seminars, along with LaBauve and others, to help golf professionals sharpen their skills.
Mike says he works with the teaching staff at the Kierland to ensure that visitors gets a total golf experience that stretches beyond the golf course and touches on not only instruction, but also includes proper equipment fitting and fitness.

“We have a lot of people who just fly in from out of town that will stay two or three days to take golf lessons,” said Mike. “The people who typically will fly out of town to go to take a golf lesson are people who are pretty serious about golf.

“We’re having a blast. It’s fun to get a student that is passionate about learning and it doesn’t matter if it’s a pro or a 25-handicapper. If they want to get better and they are passionate about learning, then it’s fun to teach them.

“A lot of times, they find they will get better in a small group setting or even an individual setting or a husband and wife setting than they would in a bigger golf school,” said Mike, who is generally booked solid, as is Sandy.

Besides her regular duties at the Kierland, Sandy also receives bookings from women all over North America. “I’m teaching mainly private lessons and small group clinics that women put together themselves,” she said.
“For instance, they have a group of friends that are from an area and they want to get together and come out, we can put them up in the Westin hotel and then, I can do an instruction program for them.

“It’s kind of a custom program, so it’s nice because we can go on the golf course, we can do some instruction in the morning, we can do a lunch and we can tailor it around what their needs are,” said Sandy, who will also send her students home with tips.  “I try to give them a good combination of things,” she said. “They can work on things with me here and they have programs to take home, so that when the weather gets bad, here’s something you can do inside that will help move you ahead in your golf game.”

In order to take a golf swing to the next level, Mike joined with Steve Heller to create the golf-specific ForeMax training program, based on each individual’s swing style and designed to work the muscles that will help the person improve. Heller, the director of ForeMax training, works out of the hotel’s Agave Spa.

“I was actually working out with Steve Heller. He was managing some other outfits here in town. I was so impressed with what he did and so impressed with the fact that he actually played junior college golf,” said Mike.  “That’s important to me is to have a fitness person that understands what I’m trying to do. I don’t just want a generic golf program. I want my fitness guy to know exactly what I’m trying to do with the golf swing and give me some things to do about it.”  That can mean work on several areas including hand and arm speed, core muscles and other aspects of fitness based on a person’s individual swing style and what LaBauve feels that person needs.

“I would say we do so much work in getting the person in the right posture,” said Heller, adding that he hears a lot about back pain from golfers, so his first concern is flexibility.  “Once we get their hamstrings, their hips and everything more flexible, that alleviates itself,” said Heller. “In conjunction with that is core stability and core strength and all of that stuff that we work on with the abs and the lower back and the hips, but it combines totally with flexibility.

“If we can just see a hotel guest for 30 minutes, I would teach them stretching before I taught them anything else,” added Heller, who is apparently getting results.

According to Mike LaBauve, a group of 12 golfers were independently tested after doing the ForeMax program for six weeks, with the average gain in swing speed being nine miles per hour.
“That’s off the chart,” said Mike. “One guy improved 20 miles an hour – that’s 60 yards in distance.”

For more information on the Kierland Golf Club, see the website, www.kierlandresort.com. For information on golf in the Phoenix area, see the websites, www.visitphoenix.com or www.scottsdalecvb.com.

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