Teaching Kids Golf: A Baffled Parent's Guide

Golf today is enjoying unprecedented popularity - and its fastest-growing segment is younger players. This latest addition to the Baffled Parent's series will ride the crest of this wave and appeal to a new generation of parents for whom golf is more popular than snowboarding, mountaing biking, and major league soccer. Bernadette (Detty) Moore, a former advisor to the Irish women's and men's golf teams, a tenured physical education professor who teaches classes in children's movement, and a teaching professional at such prestigious golf schools as The Gilette LPGA Golf Schools and Peggy Kirk Bell's Golfari, has been teaching golf to youngsters and adults for more than 25 years. She will bring endorsements from top touring professionals. "Teaching Kids Golf" provides the drills, advice and confidence a non-golfing parent needs to introduce his or her 6 to 12-year-old child to the sport. Using the proven Baffled Parent style that has elicited praise from coaches and parents alike, Moore provides the fundamentals a new instructor needs to motivate and encourage boys and girls of varying skills and dispositions.
The book provides a clear introduction to the game's basic rules and etiquette and how to play safely, then teaches the principles of everything from proper grips and swinging techniques to driving, putting, bunker play, pitching and chipping. Moore also provides tips on working with club professionals, practice methods, managing time on the course, dealing with other parents, matching drills to the young golfer's skills, and teaching kids to enjoy the experience. As with other Baffled Parent's Guides, the underlying theme should encourage children to enjoy golf. Moore, who founded a golf programme for inner city children in Beaumont, Texas, has developed a number of methods to eliminate the frustration inherent in learning golf's many subtleties (she uses soccer balls and basketballs to teach swing techniques; she illustrates proper club face positioning with a table tennis paddle; she devises simple rhymes to teach children basics). Also included will be chapter-ending question-and-answer sections dealing with typical problems a new instructor might face (My child gets angry after a missed shot or a bad drive; what should I do? My child is short; how do I find clubs he can use?).
According to the National Golf Foundation, more than 26 million Americans played the game in 1997, an increase of 7 percent from the previous year. The survey reported that the number of junior players (ages 12 to 17) increased by 34 percent during the same period.