My passion from the game of golf started around the age of 2, when I got my first plastic golf club set from my Uncle Steve, who told me during my first swings shortly after my first steps, I’d hold my follow through until my little plastic ball landed in the sand box across the lawn. Steve would take me with him time to time when his group had a spot open, it was always my favorite day of the year. I have always been pretty athletic so while I couldn’t really score, I was told I hit some outrageous shots for my age throughout the years when everything clicked, I just had no idea what I was doing. Then when I got to high school, as much as I wanted to join the baseball team having played 11 years of Little League up to that point, my 4’10” 90 pound body wasn’t built for high school baseball, so golf was my next choice and certainly ended up being the right one to make. By the time I graduated and we got third in Delaware my senior year of high school, I could actually break 40 every now and then for our 9-hole matches, I honed my skills and actually found my game in a pretty consistent spot. After a few failed attempts at college and the military (hooyah Navy) and a few years in the restaurant industry in my college hometown of Newark, DE (Go Hens) I finally figured out a career in the golf industry would be a good path to explore, and took my talents to South…Orlando to the Golf Academy of America. There during my “studies,” one of which being a Tournament Golf class where we were forced to play golf every Monday, I found a passion for actually teaching the game, a natural eye for the swing and club/body mechanics and the intricacies of the way the body moves throughout the swing. I got lucky enough to spend a year as an Assistant at my public home course when I got back home to Delaware, and from there my journey truly began.
After a year at the public track, as a Golf Professional at multiple private country clubs for the better part of a decade across Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rochester, NY, I wore a lot of hats in the industry. Most recently at Cobblestone Creek Country Club down the road from Oak Hill in Rochester, I managed member tournaments and charity events held at the club, oversaw the bag and locker room employees and their schedule and training, ran junior golf camps and programs, and taught hundreds of private lessons, including teaching at a few 2-day golf camps run by Billy Harmon of the famous Harmon family, and learned a lot about swing mechanics from a lot of wonderful instructors. During those 7 years in the golf shops, I found a passion for one thing over anything else: teaching the swing and giving lessons. Not to mention what I learned from Mr. Harmon and his incredible stories from caddying for Jay Haas against Tiger on the PGA Tour, I also had incredible head professionals like Neil Reidy at Cobblestone. Neil did an incredible job teaching me what he learned from legends in the world of the Club Professional like Craig Harmon, for whom he was the Assistant during his last years at Oak Hill, the same time he was the Assistant for Kevin Murphy at the incomparable McArthur Golf Club in Hobe Sound. It was what I learned from Billy and Neil about the swing and how to teach it so well that I found this passion for instruction, the feeling you get when a student turns around and gives you their version of the “I’ve never done that before and it was incredible,” face is one that gives me a great feeling inside.
That brings me to the reason behind this channel, site, teaching business, whatever you want to call it, but the reason I started all of this is because of all the misleading instruction that I see on social media and blog sites. This is nothing new, I used to tell all of my students that they should never, ever watch swing tips or swing instruction on YouTube or Instagram or from anywhere that the person giving you those tips can’t see your swing. This is something I still believe to this day, and while I do post swing tips and instruction, it’s all with the explicit instruction along with it that it’s not for everyone, it may not be for you, you should let someone who can see your swing recommend this instruction and these tips for you and your unique swing motion. While I do believe these videos work for some people, the amount of instruction I’ve done undoing what Instagram instructors have done to my students’ swings can’t really be ignored. I will always believe you need to get your instruction and the videos you watch need to be recommended by someone who knows your swing, your swing faults and what can fix them, and that’s what brought me to starting this business. In addition to the videos here we will offer, and you have to offer private instruction and a service where you can see your student swing the golf club and offer personalized recommendations and instruction. There are way too many different swing motions out there, way too many reasons that golfers are struggling and way too many different ways to fix them to make a video that fixes everything for everyone. There’s nothing wrong with this on its own, it’s hard to fix everything for everyone, but when a golfer tries a swing tip that isn’t what they need to fix their swing, it does nothing but take them further away from their perfect swing, it hurts them and makes their swing harder to fix. When you start a video from a perfect position at the top of the backswing without telling people how to get there, if they don’t already have a perfect backswing and get into that perfect position on top they will never be able to make those moves in your video, trying to make the downswing moves will almost always make their swing worse. These videos may help 20% of golfers but the other 80% get worse, that’s a hit rate I would never be satisfied with. The Mendoza Line shouldn’t be a goal for golf instructors and their batting average with their swing instruction videos, but that is what you get when you don’t offer that personalized instruction.
Green Grass Golf Shop 