By David Gould, Staff Editor
Two of the four coaches employed by Proponent member Kenny Nairn at Eagle Creek Golf Club no longer work a lot of weekends. The two veteran staff members, Liam Sullivan and Adam Andrews, “leave the clinics and the Saturday and Sunday people” to the staff instructors who are more early-career. “Liam and Adam have long-program clients only,” says Nairn, who owns (and teaches at) the 18-hole daily fee facility in Orlando, Florida. “The long-program golfers are here regularly during the week, not so much on weekends.”
As for that long-program golfer, he tends to be a white-collar corporate employee with flex work hours and disposable income. He’ll buy the Eagle Creek season pass—Nairn offers many versions—that best suits him. He’ll play the club’s “Back 7” loop quite often, or take a trip around the front or back nine. “What constitutes a round of golf is getting harder to define,” says Nairn, “at our course and I’m sure at a lot of others.”
Playing, practicing and working in a supervised-practice mode with a coach can blur together in ways that reward both the student and the instructor. The golfer described here is very inclined to latch onto a coach and pay for regular sessions over a lengthy time period—at Eagle Creek they actually favor the 12-month program. As for why, it would have to be that they wish to drop from a 14.2 index down to an 8.4, right? Along the way hitting target numbers for their Trackman attack angle, smash factor, and spin rate?
“No, no,” answers Kenny. “It’s much more a lifestyle thing—fun rather than pressurized. They don’t come here to grind.”
Turns out they’re the type at the local gym who go in for personal training, they’re quick to hire an executive coach in order to climb the career ladder and they’ve had the same woman cut their hair for the last 10 years, if not longer.
“What they do with their golf,” Nairn observes, “is part of their overall wellness mindset. It comes under quality of life. So we work with the Lake Nona Performance Center for wellness resources we don’t have on-site. And this spring, Liam rented a van to take 12 of his full-year students up to the Players Championship, at $150 a day each. He showed them the physio trailer, explained how tour players warm up, discussed scoring strategy, all those inside things.”
This October’s biennial Proponent Group Summit is themed around the usefulness of AI and, by contrast, the ever-increasing value of a coach’s human-connection skills. The relationship-based experience of Eagle Creek golfers signing on with Liam and Adam is a perfect example of coaches excelling by doing things that a robot never could