Kids' Calendar
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Take Me Out to the Golf Course
by Ed Tivnan
Recent surveys reveal that new golfers are exiting the game as fast as they entered, particularly women and kids. Even longtime golf fanatics are putting their clubs into the garage at an alarming rate, mainly due to the frustrations and downright humiliation of not being able to hit that little, stationary ball far and straight every single time.
Here’s the only golf tip you need to know that will improve your enjoyment of the game: Take Lessons. If Tiger Woods needs a “swing coach,” then any struggling and frustrated golfer who will not spend the price of a new high-tech driver for lessons from a teaching professional deserves his misery. And if you have kids or grandkids you’d like to get onto the course, I have a more cost-effective solution. In fact, how does FREE sound to you—as in, a week of free golf lessons? With a top teaching professional. At the region’s most beautiful practice range, where they have little pyramids of golf balls, just like the PGA Tour.
For more than 20 years, the Columbia Golf & Country Club, a private course on Rt. 217 in Claverack, NY, has offered a week-long Junior Golf Program for kids aged 5 to 16. All you have to do is sign up in advance and get the kids to club at 8 a.m., then pick them up at 10. Mark Levesque, Columbia’s head pro, and his assistants will take it from there, introducing the kids to the game of golf, from the fundamentals of the swing to course etiquette.
“The goal is to make it fun in creative ways—with games and contests,” explains Levesque, a Lenox native who has served as a teaching pro at a number of the region’s best-known courses—Cranwell Resort, Pittsfield’s Skyline Country Club, Egremont Country Club, Great Barrington’s Wyantenuck. In 2005, he moved across the state line to Columbia. To spark his students’ competitive fires, he divides the kids into teams, Yankees v. Red Sox, for example, then challenges them to “step up to the plate” and hit the ball between pre-determined targets to earn a run for their team; hitting it “out of bounds” is an out. On the putting green, the kids play a “survivor contest,” trying to get their ball closest to the hole.
As the kids get more comfortable hitting balls, Levesque gets them onto a mini golf course set up on the practice range—only 50 yards to a hole that is much larger than the standard 4.25 inch version. On the final day of the clinic, there is an afternoon “parent-child tournament,” when the kids get the opportunity to play on the 6,200 yard Columbia course. “We have a time limit of one hour and 45 minutes,” says Levesque, “and then we have a huge barbecue.”
The clinic’s prime emphasis is getting kids addicted to the joys of golf. (They will have the rest of their lives to learn the pain and cruelties of the game.) And Levesque has plenty of evidence that the program works. Last summer, 55 kids participated—more than twice the number from the year before. Not only do many kids return every summer, but alumni have become successful high school and junior golfers in the area; some are preparing for careers in the golf business. Levesque points proudly to one of the camp’s grads, Stephanie Bednar (left), who was the number one player on the Hudson High golf team her senior year. She won Columbia’s Ladies’ championship in 2008 and 2009, the same year she was “player of the year” in the 16-18 group in the PGA’s Junior Program for Northeast New York. That kind of play earned Stephanie a golf scholarship at Central Connecticut State University, where she just finished her sophomore year. “I still take regular lessons from Mark,” says Stephanie, who will be assisting Levesque with the Junior program this summer.
“The clinic got me hooked on golf,” recalls Kevin Keyser, who began the summer program at 8 years old at the suggestion of an uncle who was a member of the club. As soon as that first week was over, Kevin proceeded to turn his buddies onto hitting the little ball so he would have someone to play with. “My parents would drop me off at the course at nine in the morning and pick me up at 6:30 p.m.,” says Keyser, who played on the golf team at Hudson High School and is now a senior in the “professional golf management program” at SUNY Delhi, where he is preparing for a career as a golf pro. He will also be working with the junior golfers this summer.
Why is this program free? “It always has been,” according to Levesque. But the Columbia pro also has his eye on the future: “If kids fall in love with golf, they’ll keep playing and get their friends interested, and then maybe their parents will want to play,” says the pro, who is now mapping out a grand strategy to take his program into public school systems in the area. His goal: to reverse those numbers of people quitting the game he loves. 
Junior Golf Program Columbia Golf & Country Club
July 11-18, 8 a.m. to 10 a.m.
To enroll: 518 851-9894 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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