My two boys, ages 8 and 10, took the beginner golf class, which was advertised as a camp for ages…read more5-10. It quickly became clear that this class should be advertised for a younger age group--perhaps 5-7 years old, at the most. The equipment looked like the kind of clubs you'd buy for toddlers and my sons repeatedly told me after class that the coaches spent hardly any time working on the golf games. Basically put out equipment with minimal instructions (ie. see who can hit the ball the farthest, or try to get the ball to land on this target) but no other, more in-depth coaching. I would have at least expected the coaches to teach kids the basics. "Today we're going to work on PUTTING. Putting is for ____ and you use such-and-such clubs when you need to put." Maybe some information about how you actually play golf, how you score, how to accurately hold the clubs, perhaps? I get that there were a number of young children, but even young kids can begin to absorb these concepts and there could have been some effort to separate into two groups, so that the older kids could be given more detail.
It seemed as though the kids spent more time playing tag, running around with soccer balls, doing handstands in the grass, and otherwise playing around without any structure or goals or actual coaching from the coaches. After my boys second day, when they again told me they spent about ten minutes with the golf equipment and the rest of the time was spent running around doing whatever they wanted, I decided to stick around the next day to observe. In the hour that I was there, I found they didn't exaggerate as much as I had hoped. Thirty minutes after the class was supposed to start, they finally put out the golf equipment and it seemed highly voluntary if the kids wanted to come and see what the game was involving them. I saw very little effort to coral kids, explain concepts, or do anything coordinated. When I returned a half-an-hour before class ended, I witnessed the same--kids running around in various groups doing whatever they wanted while the coaches stood around talking together.
The soccer camp that happened to be taking place in the same field seemed to spend more time doing actual soccer-related activities, although the young coaches from the golf camp were more interested in chatting up the woman coaching the soccer camp than teaching the kids anything. One of the days, my boys said 911 had to be called because a little boy was swinging a club and bashed another kid in the face. Obviously accidents happened, but I asked if the coaches had even gone over any safety, like looking behind you before you swing. Not surprisingly, they said no. The coaches don't really explain anything, except, essentially, "hit these balls here". My boys came home from this "camp" having learned absolutely nothing. They got to practice hitting the balls for a few minutes each day, but they could have done that at home. In fact, we have a kids golf-club set that we bought used on OfferUp that looked to be better quality than what this camp had to offer. It was very frustrating to witness this level of unprofessionalism, not fulfilling anything described on the registration. I basically paid $340 for my kids to play Red Rover for three hours a day. Given that they were actually hoping to learn more about golf and we thought this would be a great introduction, this was incredibly frustrating. The only positive thing about this camp was that my kids spent time outside, being active.
