A FEW YEARS AWAY IS OK Dave Schnider, CEO Fujikura Golf
a junior was swinging out of balance, for example, he would tell the child to hold the finish so that he could take a picture of the sole of the child’s shoe. When Pet- itpas showed the junior the photograph, this served as the external reward. “If they can get some success experiences, that develops their belief that Maybe I can do this,” Petitpas says. “Then comes the self-efficacy and then comes the ad- diction to golf.” Instead of rewarding juniors only when they succeed, Brown says to also reward them for accomplishing pro- cess-based goals, like trying their best, keeping a positive attitude or being a good teammate. Equally important is to not offer these rewards every time to tap into the power of intermittent reinforcement. When utilised properly, rewards can be a powerful tool for creating a fun and communal atmosphere that will help juniors fall in love with the game. “Joy could come from having fun training sessions and then eating ice cream or a cinnamon roll together,” Nilsson says. “That could be part of making it fun, along with being with friends and being social and not always being compared because of your outcome and rankings.” Fun: A simple goal espoused by So- renstam, Nilsson, Petitpas, Brown and parents all over. But how do you know you’ve done it right? “When you take the kids home, you want them to say, ‘When can we go back, Mommy?’ That’s the biggest success,” Sorenstam says.
I introduced my son casually to golf by taking him on the course with me a few times, but at age five it was clear
that he didn’t want to play. He was getting frustrated. I wasn’t having fun either, so I took
a step back. For four years, he didn’t touch a club. He played other sports, and I played golf with my friends. He showed interest in golf again when he was nine, so I signed him up for PGA Junior League. He kind of liked play- ing with the other kids but was still more competitive in other sports. Fast forward to high school and he decides he’s done with basketball and soccer – now he wants to play golf. He absolutely dived into the game. Now he’s 16 years old and is a plus-handicap with plans to play college golf. – KL
for shooting a certain score, they erode this autonomy. “If rewards are used to consistently control the young person’s behaviour, there’s no more self-deter- mination,” Brown says. “There’s limited autonomy. Their behaviour is being con- trolled by the adult.” What’s a good way to help a child find joy in golf without constantly dangling rewards over them? Petitpas says one answer is intermittent reinforcement, which is giving a reward at irregular intervals. At The First Tee, Petitpas en- couraged creative games that would get juniors less focused on outcomes and more on the process. If Petitpas noticed
incentives are based solely on outcome, which become extrinsic motivators, they produce some short-term results in kids but do long-term damage because they lose that fun, that joy, that reason they’re playing,” Brown says. Dr Albert Petitpas, a former psychol- ogy professor at Springfield College and one of the nation’s leading authorities on sport-based youth development, agrees that extrinsic rewards like these are lousy motivators. “They put all the emphasis on outcomes and not the pro- cess of how you get there,” says Petitpas, who helped develop the foundation and training programme of The First Tee. Placing too much emphasis on out- come can cause juniors to tie their iden- tity as golfers to their identity as people, says Pia Nilsson, one of Golf Digest’s Legends of Golf Instruction. “If I can’t feel good with who I am, independent of my outcomes, then it’s going to back- fire,” says Nilsson, who along with Lynn Marriott founded VISION54, a popular performance school in Scottsdale. Self-determination theory was formed in the 1980s and is a widely ac- cepted framework for understanding human motivation. When people are self-determined, it means they are in- trinsically motivated to do an activity because they are driven by enjoyment and interest. This creates long-term sat- isfaction. However, the theory holds that to achieve a sense of self-determination, people must feel that they are in control during the activity. When parents offer their kids rewards
WAIT UNTIL THEY ASK TO PLAY David Leadbetter, Golf Digest Legend of Golf Instruction
Seve Ballesteros once told me how he’d keep his kids from the course when they were enjoying it. He wanted them to beg him to go to the golf course. When our daughter, Hally, didn’t want to play golf as a young child, we knew we had to let her do other things. For her to gain that love affair with the game, she needed the space to come to golf on her own terms, if she’d come to it at all. My wife was 15 when she started to play golf and went on to compete on the LPGA Tour. Hally was casually around golf just by being in our family, but she really loved horseback rid- ing. When Hally was 12 or 13, she said she wanted to play golf. We remained calm and supported her by getting her equipment and coaching. When Hally got into it, she really got into it. She had a good college and amateur career and turned pro. Quickly, she decided to get into the media side. Now there’s no denying how much she loves the game. – KL
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 71
JULY/AUGUST 2025
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