Player Development Is Intriguing

I’m intrigued to see the proceedings this weekend at Junior Golf-2010 and Beyond, being conducted by the Royal Canadian Golf Association and Canadian PGA this weekend at Old Ashburn in Halifax.

The main topic will be the player development side and I’m interested to see where they’re going with it. They’re calling it a junior seminar and they’re doing it across the Atlantic Provinces.

It will discuss separating your junior program from others and I’m taking a couple of assistants. I’m assuming there will be a fair bit of dialogue about what people are doing to make their junior programs stand out.

It’s supposed to be an interactive session to learn what is available to enhance and support junior programs and they want to expose people to the latest long term player development research that’s been done.

We’re working on hosting a Nova Scotia Golf Association player development camp this year and we want to get more involved in player development. We’ve had a couple of kids come out of here with great success who took part in our instruction and we’re looking at an invitation to 10 top youngsters from across Atlantic Canada.

I’m pretty pleased with the job that we’ve done with the introduction to golf for the general public, especially on the women’s side with our two-day golf schools and our introductory schools. We’ve also had great success with our men’s two-day schools.

I see what going on at the elite level of hockey and there’s no reason why we can’t do the same thing in golf.

I’ve spoken with national team coach Henry Brunton and several coaches here in Atlantic Canada have enjoyed success with elite golfers.

We have a great facility, we have a great golf course to train kids. We’re full-length, we can make it as tough as we want and we’ve got a great practice facility. Why not use it for development?

A step towards that goal will be taken this weekend in Halifax and I’ll let you know how it goes next week.