My Number One Tip for Junior Golfers

I have spent more than three decades coaching golf, and in that time I have worked with just about everyone you can imagine. Two-year-olds picking up a club for the very first time, tour professionals fighting to keep their cards, and more or less every stage in between. I have built junior programmes on three continents and trained coaches all over the world, which has given me a front-row seat to thousands of children arriving into this game full of enthusiasm. It has also, sadly, given me a front-row seat to far too many of them walking away from it.

That experience has led me to a conclusion I hold with real conviction, which is that junior golf does not actually have a talent problem at all. What it has is a development model problem. The children themselves are absolutely fine. It is the way we tend to treat them that lets them down.

So when people ask me for my number one tip for junior golfers, they are usually expecting me to say something about the grip, or the takeaway, or which drills they ought to be running. They tend to look a little surprised when I tell them, and then, more often than not, they realise it is something they already half knew but had never quite given themselves permission to act on.

Here it is. When a child runs into a difficulty, whether that is on the golf course or anywhere else in life, the most valuable thing you can do is give them the chance to own that situation themselves. Not fix it for them, not steer them neatly around it, and not explain it away before they have even had a moment to feel it. Just let them own it. And here is the part that almost every parent and coach struggles to accept, because it runs against every protective instinct we have: in that moment, the outcome genuinely does not matter.

If it turns out well, wonderful. If it turns out badly, that is honestly even better, because a bad outcome that truly belongs to the child is one of the most valuable things in their whole development. It is the raw material that learning is actually made from. The trouble is that the moment we step in, whether by correcting them before the mistake can happen or by explaining it away the second it does, we quietly remove the very thing that would have helped them grow.

That is my number one tip, and you will notice it has nothing to do with the swing. Everything that follows is simply a way of putting it into practice.

What I Have Watched Happen, Over and Over

Let me describe something I see on driving ranges and golf courses all over the world, because the remarkable thing is how identical it looks everywhere. Dubai, London, Kuala Lumpur, Florida, it makes no difference. The accents change but the pattern never does.

A child hits a shot, and before the ball has even come down, an adult voice arrives to tell them what went wrong. "You lifted your head." "Slow down." "What did I tell you about your grip?" And in that instant something important is lost, because the child had been about to watch the ball, register what actually happened, and form a thought of their own about it. Instead, they turn away from the ball and towards the adult, and the moment they make that turn, everything I care about as a coach has slipped away.

Do that a few hundred times and you end up with a very particular kind of child, one who hits a shot and looks straight at you rather than at the ball. They are not wondering what happened to the shot. They are wondering whether you are pleased with them. That is the precise moment a young golfer stops being developed and starts being managed, and although it is the beginning of the end, the end itself can take years to arrive. When it does, it shows up as the fourteen-year-old who has quietly stopped enjoying the game, or the sixteen-year-old who seizes up over any shot that matters because they were never once allowed to fail in peace, or simply the child who drifts away from golf altogether. By the time you can see the damage, it has usually been forming for a very long time.

Here is the thing that thirty years has taught me beyond any doubt: the children who survive all this and go on to thrive are almost never the most talented ones. They are the ones who were allowed to own their own experience, the whole of it, the good shots and the bad ones, the decisions and the mistakes and the small discoveries along the way. Talent might get a child noticed at eight, but it is ownership that keeps them in the game at eighteen.

This Is Bigger Than Golf, and the Science Agrees

I should be honest that I did not arrive at any of this through a textbook. I arrived at it through decades of watching what actually works with real children on real golf courses. But it has always mattered to me that what I teach holds up against the best research available, and I am glad to say that it does.

The psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci developed what is known as Self-Determination Theory, which is one of the most thoroughly tested frameworks in the whole of motivational science. At its heart it identifies three things that every human being needs in order to grow, stay motivated, and feel genuinely well, and those three things are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy, by which they mean the sense that you are genuinely the author of your own behaviour and that your decisions truly belong to you, is not some optional extra. It is a fundamental psychological need, and when it is supported children flourish, whereas when it is taken away from them, however lovingly, their development quietly suffers for it.¹

The developmental psychologist Carol Dweck spent much of her career studying how children respond to challenge and to failure. Her work on what she called the growth mindset, the idea that ability is something built through effort rather than fixed at birth, has been hugely influential across education and sport, although I should add that some of the original findings have proven harder to replicate at scale and the full picture remains genuinely contested among researchers. What the wider body of evidence does support consistently, and what I see confirmed on the golf course week after week, is that children who are allowed to wrestle with difficulty without being rescued from it develop far healthier responses to failure than those who are constantly steered away from it.²

When you narrow the lens specifically to sport, the more recent research confirms what every good junior coach already feels in their bones. Coaches who build environments in which young athletes genuinely own their own decisions end up producing athletes who are more resilient, more motivated, and far better equipped for the long haul. Not necessarily better by the end of next month, but better in the way that quietly compounds over years.³

When I think about it, the golf course has to be one of the finest classrooms on earth for this kind of learning, and I would happily argue it has no equal. Every single shot demands a decision, and every single outcome is immediate, visible, and completely real. There is nowhere to hide, no delay to soften it, no ambiguity to hide behind, and no teammate to share the blame with. The ball simply goes where it goes, and the child can see exactly what happened, provided of course that we let them look.

The Framework: Use This at the Weekend

None of this philosophy is worth anything if you cannot actually use it on a Saturday morning, so let me give you exactly what I hand to the parents and coaches I work with. When you take a young child out to play, and here I am thinking mainly of children in single digits, somewhere between five and nine years old, I would set the round up like this.

The first thing I would do is adjust the distances, so that par 3s play at around 100 yards, par 4s at 150, and par 5s at 200.

What You Talk About Instead

None of this means standing there in silence. You are very much present, curious, and engaged in what is going on. It is simply that the content of what you say has to change completely.

What you talk about is facts, and in my method there are really only two facts I want to introduce, both of them slipped in conversationally and naturally, with none of the hidden agenda that a child can always somehow smell on you.

Static aim. Where is the club face pointing at set-up, before the swing has even begun? This is a fact rather than an opinion, and crucially it is something the child can see and judge entirely for themselves. You might ask them where they think the face is pointing right now, and then let them look, and let them decide. You can follow it up by wondering aloud whether that feels aimed at the flag or perhaps a touch off to one side. Notice that at no point are you correcting them. You are simply drawing their attention to something real and then stepping back out of the way.

Dynamic aim. Where is the club face pointing at the actual moment of impact? This one is harder to see, but children are surprisingly good at picking it up. After a shot you might ask them where they think the face was looking when it struck the ball, and they will glance up at the ball flight and begin to join the dots between what the face was doing and where the ball ended up. That connection between face and flight is one of the most important pieces of understanding in the entire game, and I can tell you the professionals I coach are still refining it out on tour. When a seven-year-old arrives at it themselves, through their own eyes and their own thinking, it goes in deep and stays with them for life, whereas when you simply tell them, it goes in shallow and washes straight back out again.

The Method: Steering, Never Telling

The method underneath all of this actually has a proper name in coaching and education, where it is known as guided discovery, and I will tell you plainly that after a lifetime of coaching it is the single most powerful tool I have ever used with a young athlete. Nothing else even comes close.

The idea itself is deceptively simple. You ask questions that gently steer the child towards making their own decision, rather than handing them the answer, and rather than leading them by the nose to your conclusion and then confirming it for them. You ask, you wait, and you let them get there themselves.

Let me be just as clear about what this is not, because it matters. It is not aggressive questioning, it is not an interrogation, and it is certainly not a quiz with a right answer that you are quietly holding behind your back. The tone of it is warm and curious and genuinely interested, and the whole point is that you are a fellow explorer alongside the child rather than an examiner sitting in judgement. The very same words can carry completely different energy, after all. "Where do you think you were aiming?" asked with real curiosity is a gift to a child, whereas the identical sentence delivered with barely concealed frustration lands as a punishment, and believe me, the child can tell the difference in an instant. Children always can.

Then comes the hardest part of the whole thing, which is the pause. You ask your question, the child looks uncertain, and a silence opens up. Every loving instinct you have is screaming at you to fill that silence, to help, to hand them the answer so they do not have to sit there in the discomfort of not knowing. And my advice, as difficult as it is, is simply not to do it.

That pause is where the entire method lives. While it is happening the child's mind is working away, searching and making connections, and the moment you step in to fill the silence you do not speed their learning up, you actually shut it down. Worse than that, you teach them that uncertainty is something an adult will always come along and rescue them from, and a child who has learned to wait for rescue is never going to be the one who stands over a six-foot putt entirely alone and trusts themselves to make it.

So ask the question and then wait. If the child genuinely cannot get going, make the question smaller and a little more specific, but whatever you do, make sure the answer that emerges is always theirs. It has to be their decision every single time, with no exceptions, and I can honestly say I have never once deviated from that with a young child, nor will I, because the instant you do you have taught them that the whole method was negotiable all along.

To the Parents

I want to speak to you directly for a moment, because I have stood beside thousands of you over the years and I know exactly how hard all of this is.

You love your child, you can plainly see what they are doing wrong, and you are very probably right about it, so the knowledge that one small adjustment would help them is genuinely difficult to sit on. I want you to know that I understand this from the inside, because I am a parent of athletes myself and I have raised a tour professional, and I am telling you with complete sincerity that learning to manage that urge is the single greatest contribution you will ever make to your child's golf.

The question, you see, is never really whether you are right. The question is whether telling them is the best way to help them, and the honest answer is that it almost never is.

In my experience, unsolicited technical feedback from a parent in the middle of a round does more harm than just about anything else I have come across in junior golf, and not because parents give bad advice. Many of you give superb advice. The trouble is that the relationship between a parent and child during a round carries an emotional charge that neither of you is fully aware of in the moment, so the child does not actually hear your words as coaching at all. They hear them as evaluation, and sometimes as disappointment, and that feeling reaches them well before the content does, colouring everything that follows it, including the next shot and the one after that.

So your role out on the course is really to be a supportive and curious companion, nothing more and nothing less. Ask them questions, show genuine interest in what they think, and when something goes wrong and they feel the sting of it, resist every single urge to explain it to them. Ask them instead what they noticed, and what they might try differently next time, and then let that bad outcome quietly do its work, because I promise you it is working for you rather than against you.

I want to put this even more plainly, because it is the part most of us find hardest. You have to let your child suffer a little, and endure the pain they are feeling, because that discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is the process doing exactly what it is meant to do. The experience is holding up a mirror to their failures and their weaknesses, and in their impatience they will, at some point, badly want you to hand them a solution. That wanting is part of it too. Failure simply cannot be avoided, and in golf above almost any other game you will fail far more often than you succeed, so the sooner a child learns to sit with that and work through it, the better. The real challenge for you as a parent, the one that never quite goes away, is always whether to step in at all, and if so, when. My honest answer is that the moment should arrive far later than your instincts are telling you, and a good deal of the time it should not arrive at all.

The round, in the end, belongs to the child.

To the Coaches

If you are someone who coaches juniors, then I am going to hold you to a higher standard, quite simply because you really ought to know better.

The directive habit, the one where you tell them and fix them and move them briskly along, is faster than the alternative and it has the great advantage of looking like proper coaching. The parents watching from behind the range see a busy coach dispensing plenty of instruction, and they come away feeling they have had their money's worth. I do understand that pressure. But filling a child up with answers is not actually coaching at all, it is performing coaching, and the child is the one who ends up paying for that performance years down the line.

So build your sessions around questions instead, and train yourself to hold the pause, which I warn you will be a great deal harder for you than it ever is for the child. Measure your success not by how tidy the swing happens to look at the end of the lesson, but by how many decisions the child managed to make without you. Honestly, the best session I can picture is one where the child barely even noticed I was steering them at all.

And above everything else, protect the play. The very youngest children do not need a syllabus from you. What they need is an environment rich enough to explore properly, and an adult who is wise enough to know when to stay out of the exploring.

To the Young Golfer

And if you happen to be a junior golfer reading this yourself, and I hope some of you are, then I have a short message just for you.

This is your game. It does not belong to your mum, or your dad, or even your coach. It belongs to you.

So when a shot goes wrong, look at the ball rather than at the grown-ups standing around you, because the ball will always tell you the truth about what just happened, and the truth is the thing that makes you better. After every shot, get into the habit of asking yourself one simple question, which is what did I notice. You do not need anyone's permission to think for yourself, and you certainly do not need anyone else's answer before you have had a go at your own.

The players who go all the way are not the ones who somehow never hit a bad shot. They are the ones who take ownership of their bad shots, get genuinely curious about them, and decide for themselves what to try next. So decide for yourself, because in the end that really is the whole game.

What This Builds, Given Time

A child who has been coached this way for even a single season looks almost unrecognisable beside one who has been managed and corrected throughout, and I say that having watched the comparison play out more times than I could ever count.

They think more. They engage more, and they start asking you questions rather than waiting around to be told. When something goes wrong out on the course, they meet it with curiosity instead of anxiety, and over time they develop the kind of relationship with difficulty that most adults spend their entire lives trying to build, except that they manage it before their tenth birthday.

None of this is luck, and none of it is talent either. It is the direct and entirely predictable result of being handed ownership, over and over, until ownership simply becomes a habit of mind. They come to own their shots, and their decisions, and their outcomes both good and bad, and precisely because those things belong to them, they are able to learn from every last one of them.

That, in the end, is what we are really building out there. Not a technically tidy eight-year-old, but a thinking, resilient, self-directed human being who happens to be learning all of it through the greatest game there is.

So shorten the holes and put the scorecard away, ask the questions and learn to hold the pause, and then, hardest and most important of all, let them decide.

Let them decide.