It's the Son of a Butcher podcast. We come to you every Wednesday. This week's guests Dennis McDade. I was down in Australia a couple of weeks ago and got to spend some time with Dennis. He's one of the best golf instructors on the planet on the advisory board at the Titleist Performance Institute. But I think he's most known currently right now is he's the coach for Mark Leishman.
He's done a great job with his golf swing, but he to me is at the forefront of junior golf development and that is a lot of what this pod this week is about. Having an opportunity to sit down with Dennis and pick his brain about junior golf, junior golf development, how he works with juniors. He has been at the forefront of junior golf development, helped the guys at the Titleist Performance Institute, doctor Greg Rose and Dave Phillips.
Dave's been on the pod as well numerous times, but really helped kind of redesign their team junior program and it was a game changer for me. It's completely changed the way that I teach juniors. We get into how to teach juniors what to look for. One of the cool things about getting to travel is you sometimes run into people that you don't see on a regular basis. Dennis lives down in Australia, so I see him a
couple of times a year. But being down in all's got to sit down, take a deep dive into junior golf development, junior golf instruction. So if you're a junior golfer, if you have junior golfers in your life as coach or as a parent, and if you're a junior listening, this is a great one. And Dennis, like I said, he is at the forefront of junior golf development. So I think everyone's going to get a lot out of this. Sit back and enjoy listening to Dennis McDade, Dennis Year
and I've known each other a long time. For those listening that don't kind of know your background, obviously, coach Mark Leishman, you've worked with a ton of players. You're on the your senior advise reboard at the Titless Performance Institute. We had d Phillips on a couple of weeks ago after John Rahm winning. Definitely want to get into that. But for everyone listening kind of tell your background and how you got into golf and golf instruction.
Yeah, well I was. I was when I was a much younger person human. I was a competitive swimmer. So between the age and yeah, there you go. So between the age and I'm going to say eight and thirteen to fourteen, I was a competitive swimmer. Was it was an outdoor pool, so we'd trained sort of spring through summer and autumn and then winter there was there was no swimming. It was an outdoor pool. And to be honest, back there, I got to the stage where it was really hard to jump in the cold pool at the
start and the end of the season. So so Dad, who was a Scott, played a bit of golf and then during winter I started going out with him and just at the local un civil course and got the bug.
And you like about golf at an early age, what I really liked was just the interaction with the other juniors.
So where I was in Victoria, which is in the south of Australia, juniors at a golf well, first of all, you could join as a junior. Secondly, could plane competitions even on weekends. You could plane club championships, but every school holiday, my dad was a construction form and he dropped me off at the course on the way, dropped me off at the course on the way to work, and he picked me up on the way home. So I just spent my holidays at the golf course with
my buddies. And I really that really appealed to me, that that social side of things, and you know, being able to play in practice with people my own age. And then the actual game. The actual game got me, you know, and from a young age, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a tour player, you know, like I was all right. And obviously the fact that I'm sitting here talking about coaching says that I'm a foil player, But no, that was the the
start of me. It just golf hooked me really really quickly. It was like for all people, it was frustrating, but it hooked me really quickly, and I just ended up devoting my life to trying to be a player. And then one of the things that I'm thankful for is is the PJA professionals who I served my traineeship under. I think they call it assistance in the US, assistance. They were both. They both so it was Bruce Grant Row Melbourne and Bob Spencer at keys Mcgolfer, the two
guys that I worked under. They both encouraged me to coach. They said, hey, this is definitely part of being a PG professional. You need to know how to repair a golf club. Remember how to repair a golf club. That's what I think for Simon.
Heads to know was, you know, sanded them down, learned how to rewheip the shaft. Those are by gone days.
Well, explain to my son not that long ago what it meant, because I still say I got it out of the screws because they had.
We're also Jennis, we're also dating ourselves. So everybody listener going down those guys are really all wooden golf clubs. And you didn't just go by them and get shafts.
And no, and you didn't you didn't change your driver every year and that sort of thing. But anyhow, so so both my my bosses were great. They encouraged me to coach and and and I knew before I finished my traineeship that if things didn't work out as a player, I was going to be a coach because I really enjoyed the social interaction of that as well, like it's
it's a real relationship sort of thing. So so when I played in Australia for probably three years or so and then started to go down the path of coaching, and my first coaching job I taught golfers hitting balls into a net at a pitch and put course. That's where I where I started out. And Goody's going to start somewhere, that's right. That's so there were yes, it was that was my start and and I think one of the things I realized pretty quickly is I had an idea what I was doing. So I went and
bought some equipment. So back in those days, it was the big camera, like it had no shut of speed, but big camera took the full VHS tape in the side pack and out of the VHS recorder and TV and I used to draw lines and I figured out I still didn't know what I was doing. So it was that point I went and started spending time with some of the better known coaches around Melbourne to try
to learn some more. So I'd booked time with them and I'd literally take my tapes along and just go, hey, can I talked about some of the clients that I've been working with and get your opinion on what I'm doing and that sort of thing. So that's where I started off with a fairly broad sort of stroke with that people have spent time with and then gradually sort of whittled that down to the to the people that I was really getting some what I thought was really
good information from. So those people Dale Lynch, you know, Dale Lynch was one of those. Dale coached me a bit when I was playing. Stephen Bahm spent some time with you. I intrigues like a lot of different people that I that I whose opinion I sought, and that was sort of the start of me starting to get a bit more of an idea of what not just the technical aspects of coaching were, but the approach and
that sort of stuff. And then anyhow so I sort of I sort of progressed and was coaching full time, and to cut along story short, I ended up I won a coaching scholarship to what was the then Australian Institute of Sport Golf program. I was by this time, I was in Queensland up on the Sunshine Coach Coast, coaching a couple of places, and I got a coaching scholarship with with the AIS program, and the head coach, unfortunately passed away at quite a young age, was Ross Herbert.
And that was my first taste of elite, a proper elite development program. And I thought I was pretty good coach. And then I got into that program. I thought, wow, I haven't even sort of scratched the service here yet, you know. And to spend time watching someone who was so skilled not only coached the plays, but how he structured the program. And then to see like that was back in so I did ninety five, nineteen ninety five,
nine ninety six. I am dating myself there a bit, but to see the marriage of the high performance coaching but also the sports science and the sports medicine how that all interacted. And then from there Steve Manadelnch with the head coach and the assistant coach of the VIS program.
Yeah, the Victorians the sport which was you know, to me is one of it is a legendary you know program, it's to me, it's one of the seminal programs of golf, of modern golf development. You guys kind of were at the forefront coming from Australia, you know, not so much doing it out of the limelight, but because this is so far away. But what you guys were doing was kind of groundbreaking stuff and it was kind of a precursor to what I believe a lot of the US college system does now.
Look, there's no doubt in my mind that that the model that the that the VICE program was back then and was carried through for quite some time was one that was used as a template around the world for pipe performance development of golfers. There's no doubt.
Aaron Badley, Jeff Ogilby, Stuart Appleby, well, all of kind of that the last generation, the kind of pre Adam Scott generation came out of the vis What was the what was the goal of the of the v I S Golf's program? What did you if you had to like sum it up, what would you say? The goal was, Well, the goal.
Was to produce players who would achieve it international amateur and especially professional levels. So the goal was to produce top hundred players in the world or top fifty players in the world. And ultimately, once you get to that stage, you're now in that realm where you can produce major winners. As well once you get to that level. So that was very clearly a goal was to develop to develop these young athletes into world class players who are winning
at the highest level. That was clearly the goal. And when you've got a goal like that, you can actually structure a program that's meeting those needs. It's not about trying to make them play good for the next Ameur event or an event in three months. The whole mindset is around is okay, well we've got this let's say eighteen year old male coming into the program. It's like, okay, what do we want them to look like in their
mid twenties? And everything was structured working back from being a world class an international players.
So kind of what the Olympic development does in other countries. It just had never really been done in golf before, right, really hadn't been golf and golf instruction and golf development hadn't really been treated like you know, the Russian gymnastics system, what they do in China and what they do at all of these elite performance centers exactly.
So from from our point of view at the at the at the v I S, if you look at just the numbers that would be coming through the state if you like, you know, the number of like, our numbers are smaller than say in the US, So we structured a program going, well, we're only going to have a finite number of players come through our system. We need to put a program in place that helps every
single one of them achieve the highest level possible. So it was it was a it was a very high performance development focused program with that goal in mind that we want these juniors and well so much juniors, but these male and female athletes coming through the program to win on PGA Tour, to win majors. And that was as I said that, that was very clearly the goal of the program.
Cut to the chase. You're on the advisory board at the Titleist Performance Institute. I've had Dave Phillips on the on the podcast number of times junior golf development. In my opinion, you're at the forefront, and I think the things that you did for junior golf development, it was really kind of changed everybody's way of thinking. And I think one of the amazing things, and I know you said this, once junior golfers were tended to be taught by the lowest person on the totem pole at the club,
an assistant golf pro who was a trainee. He didn't know anything. He basically has a bunch of kids. They don't know anything. So I remember at a TPI junior seminar once you said, what has happened in the past is amateurs teaching amateurs how to play golf?
Yeah, rookies coaching rookies.
Rookies coaching rookies, and that that was so obvious that that was the wrong route to go to produce golfers and try and get them in. But that's what happened for years and years and years.
It was a real it was a real afterthought. And when you think about I know, you've been very closely linked with TPI and all the work we've done. Once you understand what needs to be done from you know, let's say the age of you know, five through to twenty years of age, you understand just how important it is for our coaches to be highly trained, Like there's a huge market around the world to be a highly skilled junior coach. But that was certainly something that was
missing in the air. I suppose when when I was learning to play golf, it was actually hard to get an experienced coach to give you a golf lesson, and it was just rookies coaching rookies, and it was just if you sort of was deep en theory, right, throw them all in the deep end. Whoever swims, you survive, you know. So I think that a big part of what we've done at TPI. And I can't take credit for all of it, you know, I'm one of an
amazing advisory board. Is we basically stood back and just said, okay, well, with what we know about human growth and development from childhood through to adulthood, and what we know about how I suppose you should structure a golfer or a young athlete who athlete, I'm sorry, who comes into your program with no skill? How do you actually turn them into an athletic golfer? And that was the genesis of the
whole TPI junior program. And I think the other thing that really has changed too, and it's kind of forced to rethink on the way we coached is I started playing golf when I was eleven. How old were you when you started? Probably younger?
No, I mean, listen, I didn't really play a lot of golf, but my background was I just like to watch my dad golf lessons, so I was trying to figure out the instruction side of it and that piece of the puzzle. I mean, I've said this numerous times, and for a long time I was embarrassed to say this, but I'm not now. I was never a golfer at any level. I didn't play junior golf. I didn't play high schol golf. I didn't play college golf. I didn't
play amateur golf. Golf wasn't cool. And I think this leads into what I was going to talk about with junior golf. Golf when I was growing up, I'm fifty four in about a week's time. My dad was a golf instructor. He wasn't the person he is today. Golf wasn't cool when I was growing up, even though my grandfather won the Masters in nineteen forty eight. But in the eighties and nineties, golf wasn't what it was now, and it wasn't seen as a sport. It wasn't seen as athletic.
So if you look at that component what you've just said there, so if you look at golfers now, I think I used to call it an emergent demographic. It's now demographic, and that's like the five to ten year old junior golf. Like they just weren't around when I was a kid. No one played golf when they were six or seven or whatever. You'd play whatever the summer and winter sports work. But we now we've got to a stage where I feel I get emails and phone calls going, hey, I've got a three year old, when
can we sign up for the program. So it's like, well, you need to be ready for that because you might not have a three year old in the program, but you can provide advice around what you do with that with that category of like that age I should say, of junior golfer. But to come back to your point around not being cool and not being athletic, we have this this demographic of junior golfer and their sedentary so
they're not not as active. Like when I got home from school when I was a kid, like I'd unlock the door, I'd throw the school bag inside the door, pull the door shut before mom could tell me to come to my homework, and they didn't see me till dark and I'd be playing cricket in the streets or footy or soccer or whatever it was, and that was our athletic development.
One of the things in going to all the junior seminars that I've gone to and listened to you and Greg and Dave talk, kids don't play anymore, right. They don't climb trees, they don't play kick the can, they don't ride bikes, they get driven everywhere, they sit in chairs, they're on their phones all the time. And one of the TPI mantras from a junior standpoint has been to create athletes first, golfer. Second, we all teach regular people
to play golf. Right, you have a fifty five sixty year old person who's been playing golf their entire life. They're a business person, they don't really do anything athletic. It's very hard to train a non athlete to play golf. And I think one of the things that was just mind blowing to me, And again it seems it was groundbreaking when you guys came up with it, but it was like, yeah, it's much easy. It's easy for me and you to work with tour players because they're skilled athletes. Right.
You can tell them to do things, you can get them to do things they can do what you ask them to do from an athletic physical scamper the technical side of things, that's something different. But having an athlete first, and you know, if you get a golfer that comes in and he's in his forties and he's played multiple sports his whole life, he's in the gym, he's active and stuff, they're much easier to coach and train and help improve than if they have no athletic ability.
I couldn't agree more so. I think if they're and I'm sure there aren't like any golf coach could relate to this. You have like a I don't know, an eight or a nine year old boy or girl walking to your academy. They've never picked up a golf club. You show them how to hold a club and straight away they go whosh, and you just go, my god, I've got a superstar in my hands because you're looking at athletic expression and they're able to pick up a
golf club and apply that really quickly. But what a lot of people fail to realize is what's happened before they've walked into your academy. Right, they're probably from the age of since they can walk they've sampled all these
different sports. They're a good or round athlete, and then they can just express that when they hold a golf club and try to hit a golf ball, and if you look at the other side of that, you get that sentry child that we were just talking about, who come in and you go, my god, I'm going to have them work cut out here, And at least now we know rather than going, my god, how am I
going to teach them to play? Like? My mind set is straight away, I've got to turn them into a better athlete, because if I can turn them into a better athlete, it makes it so much easier for me to teach them how to become a golfer. And one of the things, and you've heard us talk about this, the five reasons kids do sport right. Number one, it's got to be fun. Number two, we've got to make they've got to be able to do it with their
friends or make friends. Number three, they've got to feel welcome, so we want to talk about some of the country clubs and what happens around the world. Number four, it's got to feel too, feel good to do. And the other one is they've got to be good at it. So if you get a young junior coming to the program they've got no athletic ability and they suck at golf, they're probably not going to hang around too long. Right. So our job is to actually as coaches, is to
is to recognize that assess them. We always assess. Don't guess right, We assess and we just go, hey, Jimmy or Jane, there's a couple of holes in your athletic development here. Golf can be a difficult game until we get those, you know, sorted out.
But don't worry.
You hang with us. We're going to sort those out. You're going to be a good player, you know, eventually, whatever approach you want to take. But being able to understand that, you're not seeing lack of commitment or ability, you're seeing a lack of athletic development, which makes it tough as coaches. Right.
One of the things my grandfather said, and he passed it on to my father, and my father passed on to me. My dad used to always say, it's our job to teach people to play golf, not teach golf to people. And I think a lot of what we used to do with juniors is we'd have these lessons with a six seven year old, and we'd be trying to give them golf lessons like we give someone who's been playing golf twenty years. Work on your grip, posture,
stance alignment. One of the things that was groundbreaking to me when I watched you all at TPI when you developed your Junior Golf Cyclone. And I'd love for you to talk about that. You guys were working with juniors for an hour and kids that have never really they've got a golf club in their hand for less than five to ten minutes of them. Talk about the Junior
Golf Cyclone and how it came about. Because I know part of that came about with you, because I've seen the videos and I've watched how you raised your children and the crazy things that your children were doing on jungle gym's where ives and I remember once saying, it's a good thing you don't live in America because someone would sue you for allowing your children to play like that, because kids don't do that anymore. But the Junior Golf Cyclone. Talk to me about what that is.
So the Junior Golf Cyclone that basically aligns with the fundamentals phase in LTAD long Term Athlete Development, and basically our philosophy there is we want to hook these kids on golf.
Right.
So, but if you had a I don't know, a six year old boy and you had him hit balls for an hour and he's not very good, he's probably going to get see a golf pretty quick, right, He's going to end up really not enjoying himself.
Again, that's teaching golf to people. This is golf, this is how you have to learn it, and if you can't learn it like that, well then golf just isn't for you.
Correct.
And that's I did that. I think everybody that's an instructor at some point that's listening to this. If you're an instructor, you did that. At some point you were saying, hey, this is golf. We're going to teach it to you, and if you can't absorb it or do it, then you need to find another sport.
Yeah. So basically exactly right. So basically with the psyche plone, our we get together. If I explain what happens, we get together. We have some warm ups which are like it's all age appropriate, right, So it's an age appropriate warm up. It's a bit of fun, but there is an intent behind that and it's developing what we call
fundamental movement skills. So four categories of that. There's locomotion, anything used to get from A to B, the ABC's agility, balance, coordination, speed, object control, kicking, throwing, striking, punching.
I mean, that's another thing that's huge, hugely important in junior golf development is the ability to kick, the ability to throw, the ability to punch. One of the things that I know that you guys at TPI came up with that girls versus boys catching patterns, the ability to catch an object. It's very different in young boys versus young girls, but that is a fundamental pattern of trying to find your in space, how to grasp an object.
There are so many things that you're asking someone to do when they throw you a ball, but if you don't know how to catch a ball and do that, it's very difficult to progress.
Yeah. Correct, So you can, like with what we're talking about here with the athletic development, I'll get back to the cyclone at the moment you actually need a child, oh I think anyway, a child athletic development specialist. So the perfect. The perfect analogy I would give here with this category of junior, with this early age junior is like the primary school in Australia, I think, do you call it elementary school like elementary school in the US.
Like the sports teacher from the elementary school or from primary school is perfect for this program because that's what that says, special jump rope. That s yes, specialty Ryan is in developing that. So our cyclone basically we have a warm up which and again it's not just warming up, there's an intent to that. Then we take our juniors through a number of stations, okay, and it's all around athletic development, and it's a golf program, so there's some
golf stations. So in our cyclone program there are four athletic development stations if you like, and two golf stations. So when I'm talking about a station, there will be an activity in each one of those stations. So it might be, hey, there's a target over the Volco target over there. You've got to pick up one of those balls and you've got to throw it at the target. Keep score if you like. Whatever. That's just an example, right, and what we do in each one of those stations.
Because juniors have different juniors are at different stages of development. We can grade the difficulty, provide a little more challenge, back off on the challenge a little bit, and then the instructor is in there a bit like you spoke about with coaching before. The instructors in there providing some really age appropriate coaching if you like, around how to throw a better, or how to how to you know, jump better, or whatever it is. And then there'll be
a couple of golf stations as well. And each one of those golf stations. By the way, it doesn't look like you and I coaching an adult like there is an outcome based activity. It's it's very much game based. There might be one point of instruction, so I would use example that well. I always say this development sequential. You can't start with calculus if you're learning maths, right, You've got to start with with all the basics. So we do that in our program and just on that
haven't spoken about it yet. One of the great things that the advisory board did when we're having the discussions around this, and you've got you've got the likes of Dr Ernstwick, who's a you know, who's a specialist in growth and maturation. Now what a man is Mile O'Bryant, Greg Rose, Istvan Bali. You know all of these these guys, and we've just said, hey, what's the best what's the best structure for learning in the world. We've just gone all to school.
Right.
So, if you've got a young child and you take them along to grade one, there's an expectation as a parent that when they come out at the end of grade one, they're going to have certain they're going to have been exposed to certain skills.
Certain skills to allow them to go to grade two. Correct.
And that was our philosophy around structuring the program for the cyclone and from there was two was going, right, well, what's grade one? What do we have in grade one? What do we having grade one from a golf point of view? What do we have in grade one from an athletic development point of view? How do we make it fun, age appropriate and have them actually learn something?
Because what we want is we want our We want them coming back because we know we need them for like ten years, right, we know that it's a minimum of ten years. We need them four to turn them into highly competent golfers. So that's where we so the cyclone again sort of going backward and forwards. We start
with a warm up, we run through the stations. The stations run from maximum of about four and a half to five minutes, so there's no getting stuck in a station for twenty thirty minutes because when we're.
Dealing with young kids, the retention span. But again, we used to expect a six year old kid to be able to focus in a golf lesson teaching them golf stuff that you would be teaching to a forty five year old fifteen handicapper, and we would get as instructors, you get frustrated because the kid's not listening. But it all now seems so simple in the way that you teach logically, the way you would do everything else.
Yeah, exactly right. And that's the thing we were talking about rookies coaching rookies before. I think with what we know now, when I look for a new junior golf coach, I have one criteria and one criteria only, and that is you want to coach juniors. You're absolutely that's all you want to do is coach juniors. Because I feel like I can give you everything else you need. Everything else you need to be a great junior coach. I have to have for teaching junior two cook story. I
moved from a facility. This is going back twelve years ago. I moved from a facility where I built up a big junior program to the other side of town. It was like twenty five miles away, and we were starting from scratch, and so we ran a school holiday program. So we advertised around all the local elementary schools program schools, and we had a whole bunch of juniors arrived and I said to the coach as I said, right, who
wants to be junior coach? And they all put the hand up and I thought, okay, well I'll give you a run. And anyhow, we ran this junior golf school, and what I was really interested in is what the coaches did in the breaks. So so I kind of I kind of kept a bit of an eye on what they were doing, and you know, they kind of had a bit of an idea or not, and that wasn't important to me. But there was one coach who in the break, like just about every kid in the
program was following around. He kind of looked at I'm showing them away, and I've just gone, that's my junior coach because the kids are gravitating to him. And kids are very perceptive. Right, if you don't pass a sniff that, if you don't pass a sniff test with the kids, you're done right. And out of all the coaches, they just hung around him, and I just said, hey, you've got the makings of a junior coach. He said, he said, do you think really said, I didn't think I knew
what I was doing. I said, yeah, but the kid love you. And that was it. So he's actually still running my junior program out at Yarraban Public Course. He's just done that ever since. And he's a great junior coach.
Yeah, give me Dennis for I know it's a generalization, but for junior golfers and for junior golf parents, one of the things that we know the worst case, and I know this is the worst case for you. The thirteen year old child whose parents took them out of all other sports at six years old, and for the last six years old, the twelve year old has done nothing other than play golf. He's got a beautiful golf swing, has no real athletic talent, has no real athletic development.
He just plays golf. You get those, I get those I hear all the time. No, No, my son just focused on golf. Just focus on golf. My daughter should just focus on golf. What are the pitfalls that you feel that that can cause with junior golfers and how it can inhibit their development?
So the first thing I would say is an moving just as an extension of what we spoke about before and the structure of the cyclone program from an LTD. From an lt a D point of view, there's a window that needs to be hit. Okay, and I didn't
mention this when we were talking about cyclone. There's an opportunity to build speed, right, So there are windows of opportunity from the maturation from childhood to adulthood that you and the easiest way to explain them for those parents who might be listening is there are times in that period from childhood to adulthood where the body is particularly trainable for certain athletic attributes. So we talk about speed, strength, stamina, skill,
et cetera. So, so what happens when there's been a focus on golf early you will develop some of those athletic attributes, but you won't develop all of them. And as we know nowadays, like people are always talking about speed and there are two speed windows. Like if you've focused solely on golf from a young age and that's all you've done, you've probably missed that window, and that will put a ceiling on how fast you can be if you like, when you're an adult.
What are those speed windows?
Speed windows now different for boys and girls? And you're going to You've put me right on the spot here. I'm going to say the first speed window for girls is four to seven years of age biological aide. Second speed window, sorry, first speed window for boys is six to nine years of age and biological age, not chronological age because they all grow at different speeds. And then the second window is that take off when they go
through the growth spurt. And I'll get this wrong, but I'm going to say it's thirteen to fifteen for boys, and I think eleven to fourteen for girls. It's like that, it's like when they start growing fast, you train them fast, right, That's how I thing. When they're growing fast, train them fast. But that would be roughly correct. There'll be a few LTAD people just sort of look skywards when I said that,
but it's basically there and I think that. Sorry, just to answer your question, I think the danger with developing skills only you get that illusion of success. So if you've got a skilled coach training a junior in all the technical aspects of golf, they can go out there and perform at quite a high level as a junior, but they're going to get overtaken by the athletes who also develop their technical attributes along the same time. At
some stage they're going to get overtaken. So they might be the ones who are, you know, winning the trophies at a young age, but often they get overtaken. So I think, you know, we use the some of our research suggests that I think it was three to four percent of age division winners, junior age division winners around the world go on to achieve at professional level. So in my mind, it's like, I don't want to what's there's no rushes shouldn't be focused on winning at those
age levels. There should be a focus on development, like even right through to sort of nearly college level. Right.
Do you think that could be the reason why, Dennis that I guess this is a generalization, but I see more juniors that are better when they're fifteen and sixteen than they are when they're twenty. Right, and the world beaters, I mean they're winning. There are prolific golfers, and that jump from level to level to level. And you know, there are a lot of people playing golf at a very very high level that are superstars that weren't necessarily
great juniors. They weren't the best junior in their city, they weren't the best junior in their state, their country, and then you have these other kids. You know, I always ask tour players, hey, when you were growing up, was who was the g right? Who was the best player?
And who are you surprised that didn't make it? And every tour player will go, man, when I was when I was a junior, when I was in high school, even when I was in college, this kid was a absolute world beater stud and they just never made it.
Why do you think that is? That's just such a sad scenario where they've played the best golfer, They laugh between fifteen and seven eight, all right, like that says, what the hell did we do wrong? You know? But I look at that situation. I've seen it a lot if you look at So if you take that example of the years before of someone who's focused solely on golf, let's say, and they're developing those golf specific skills, and
then they get their growth spurt before everyone else. So now that not only have they got golf skill, they've got the advantage of some early strength and size, right, doesn't mean that they're better athletes. And at that stage you've got golf specific skill that's been developed with the addition of some length. And that growth spurt affects everyone differently. Some people, some juniors, hit the growth spurt and they lose their they lose their skill. It's not unusual, and
some don't. It's just it affects everyone differently. But I think you know what happens is a lot of the late bloomers. So if we talk about LTA D that the ones that hit their growth spurt late, they spend more time in skills phase. So after our cyclone program, we have our smash program, which is the easiest way to put it, is like late elementary school age. We always talk biological age, but I'm just trying to give
one a bit of an idea around it. And that's from an LTA D point of view, that skills phase, right, So if you hit your growth spurt later, you can have an extra year developing or two developing your skills before you hit your growth spurt. Okay, so just remember in our program, although I call it skills phase, you're developing skills around all of your athletic hat reviews as well.
So now once those kids get or those juniors get through the growth spurt and whatever challenges that's presented, they're better athletes. They're as skilled, if not more skilled, because they spent more time in skills phase and they overtake those juniors a lot of them anyway, that were early bloomers and skills specific if you like, just focus solely on skill now some of them make it now, they
don't all fail. But with the way the game is nowadays, like we know how much the game's changed over the last sort of twenty to thirty years. Yeah, just lends itself to the ones that are as we say, athletes first, golf sag and love for the game A lot build a love for the game along the way.
What are some sports for junior golfers outside of golf that you think are really really important but also can help develop golfers.
That's a great question because you can spend a lot of time being a multi sport athlete and play all the sports that really don't help golf much. Right, So I think the best sports, like golf's a ballistic rotary movement. Right. So I look at any of the field sports, Olympic field sports like you know, shot put, discus, hammer, any javelin, any of that stuff, I'm just going, yeap, giddy up, let's get in there. That's that's really going to help rotation.
That's rotation. I think things like table tennis is really good, like starting to understand spin reaction, that sort of thing. I really like volleyball for vertical jump and obviously there's a rotation in spiking that sort of thing. And bad minton. I really like bad minton as well for similar reasons.
Jam Plenty of one of the old world long drive guys. He was a he was a competition badminton player. He and everybody said, you know, here's a kid. He was like one of the early long drive guys. But he wasn't big, he wasn't a body builder, but he was able to create that kind of speed. One of the other ones I know that that that you and Greg and Davi at TPI talked about martial arts big for golf.
So if we yes, so, I would think if you go backwards just a little bit, saying into a slightly younger age, say even pre cyclone cyclone, I think martial arts are great because it's training both sides of the body. Like when you work up and down the jojo, you're using both sides of the body. That's the first day you get there. That's trained right. And there's all sorts of movements where you have to move, you know, stabilize, rotate, throw, kickstrup.
There's a whole bunch of stuff there. And then the other thing is gymnastics, like peewee gymnastics and that sort of thing that's totaling yep.
I mean one of the things that I know that you all do with a lot of juniors, and again you do this in front of pack. I've actually and I implement now this with junior golfers that are in high school. Hopping, skipping, rolling patterns massive for learning how to control your body in space, learning how to accelerate decelerate, but you'd be surprised. I mean, you'll watch it and I do this. Now. I'll watch a kid and he's trying to play golf. The parents have taken him out
all the other sports. You can see that his coordination and his ability to control the club face isn't really great. And I remember you all doing this at a TPI junior conference once. We got a kind of a ladder that you put on the ground where you have to you know, just boxes you have to hop, skip and learn how to control. It's amazing to watch kids that are trying to play competitive golf that have no ability to hop from one box to the next box. Today.
Things that you did is kids when I was growing up, you hop scotch. Nobody plays those sports. Nobody does that anymore. Those patterns, the running, skipping, jumping, learning how to jump rope all things that we used to do as children and that children don't do today, but are massively important for you as a human being to be able to learn how to control your body correct.
Yeah, and to some extent, everything you've just spoken about there is what we've put back into our junior program because are just so critical to like that's the athletic foundation that our juniors need to to begin to become decent players. And we look at we're very specific with what we do. So in our cyclone, for example, we teach them how to sprint, like just shortbursts. Everything's fast, right, because that speed windows open. But the movements we have,
we do skipping because skipping teachers dissociation hip association. So we have exercises that are in our athletic stations and in our golf stations that teach transition without them holding onto a golf club, Like, how do you teach transition and the movement you want to a five year old where you better not have a golf club in the hand to be talking about, Hey, what I want you
to do? As you get near the top? I want you to start yell ower, body firing this like you need a game and an activity where they don't even know that you're teaching it, right, So we have activities. We have skipping in there, we have hopping and of course you know the ability to jump and stabilize in a leg Hay, I think that's in a golf swing and then sliding side to side where you're transferring weight having to stabilize, go back the other way, stabilize like
they're all like, it's interesting. Sometimes you get parents go hey, why are you doing this, And I'll just say, hey, in the golf swing, you gotta do this, and they go, oh, I get it. Cool.
That's great because one of the things that you do that I've seen you guys doing. We did this as well in our junior program that we have in Dubai. Having a young child, say listen, swing this tennis racket, you know, do this for ten reps. Now take a ball and throw the ball right. Do that ten times. Now kick a soccer ball. Do that ten times, and both sides of the body, both sides of the body. And then say, all right, remember what you were doing
when you had the tennis racket in your hand. Now we're going to put a golf club in your hand. It's basically the same type of and I think because golf has always been taught as is, but I think back in the day, golf was taught in a way that it was golf specific, right. These were golf specific movement patterns that didn't really have anything to do with the wider athletic movement that you would make another and
every other sport, right. So I don't think most people that are trying to play golf realize how much you are asking your body to do in a dynamic movement pattern that's over in one point five to two seconds. We're asking you and you've got two feet, two legs, two arms, two hands, You've got all of these body parts that you're trying to coordinate in a very very small window, and we're asking you to do that from
a completely static position. I gave a golf lesson once to a guy that had sold his semiconductor company to the US government and was now a I mean a captain, I mean just made stupid money. And when I tell you, Dennis, he had no athletic ability. He was a scientist, he's a buffin right. He just had no athletic ability at all. And he wanted to learn how to play golf. And it was just like pulling teeth. It was brutal, and
he's sweating and I'll never forget this, he said. You know the hardest part about this sport for me is I have to start the move movement from zero energy. And I just went, what the hell did you just say? It? Just blew my mind. I'm like, yeah, because every other sport that you play, you're running to where the opponent
is you think is going, or is going. You're throwing the ball to where the So it's all about but in golf, we put you in this static position, the balls on the ground, you're to the side of it. You've got to hold a golf club with two hands, but there's only one golf club. And now we go, okay, now you start the movement from no movement and figure
out a way to control that. And so I think all of the things that you're talking about that you guys do in these junior golf cyclones are all about trying to get people to understand that golf is just like every other sport you play that's really a road or re sport. You're going to get your body to move in a pattern and throwing, kitching, kicking, punching, striking patterns are hugely important for motor skill development.
And they have at one hundred percent true and they have a very direct correlation to a golf swing. Is like we've said it a couple of times already, but there's a great transfer of learning into into a golf swing, and you know a lot of the stuff around club phase control that can be done at a younger age. You know, you've heard us say the seminars all the time. Our goal in the cyclone program is speed, Like we
could care less where it goes, because let's create some speed. Hey, when we're in skills phase, we'll start to teach a little more around some of that control. Remembering that the junior boys and girls who are in our cyclone program like to some extent, it's the larger muscles that are wired that that that brain development and the smaller you know, fine control over the smaller muscles happens later in the
maturation cycle. So why are we trying to teach like awesome club face control here where they haven't actually got control over the bodies yet. It's kind of like what you just said before. You know, it's that that static movement having to control all these things. Well, that they're still learning to feel their body let alone, and not all the muscles are wide beautifully yet you know that that happens in that in that next phase right with
with with with brain development, start laying milin down. You know, all the different pathways and.
I've got a really good friend.
Sorry getting it off track there.
I've got a really good friend that used to play professional football soccer in the UK, Irish god named Stephen Grant. And after he started playing after he quit playing golf, he decided, or after he quit playing football, he decided he wanted to be a professional golfer. He's made it the second stage in Europe and the US a couple of times. One of Roy McElroy's really really good friends. You know, he's got kind of a unique golf swing.
But the guy's short game is as good as savvy bi asteros, because the way that he would kick a football, the way that he would move his foot to spin the ball in different directions, and he's like a savant with short game, and tour guys play with him and they're like, bro, your short game is unbelievable. But it all came from his ability to kick a football and to have it move in a certain pattern in a certain way, and to spin the ball in a certain
way with his foot. He took the exact same thing that he did with his feet and just applied it.
They are swinging shots.
He's a great shaper of the golf ball too. He can move the golf ball a lot of different He was never really the longest player, but his ability to control the flight of the golf.
Ball, and he would he would I mentioned, he would see it.
And his short game was devoid of technique. Like I taught him for a long time and he would go, let's go work on your short game. And I'm like, mate, your short game is you don't need to work on that. And he's like, yeah, but I feel like my technique isn't good. I was like, your technique is unbelievable because it works. He's like, yeah, but I don't like the way it looks. I said, who cares how it looks. It's so unbelievably functional. But that all came from the
way that he was trained. I've been lucky enough to meet some of the the polo guys, the Pierra's Boys from Argentina. The things that they can do with golf clubs as a result of the way that they are on horses, their eye hand coordination in riding a horse
but also using a polo mallet. When I watched them play golf again, their short games are beyond belief because they're riding on a horse at twenty five miles an hour and they've got to nudge this ball at full speed hanging off this horse, and they've got amazing short games. It's fascinating to watch that kind of crossover from other sports.
Dennis, that was a little bit sorry, just that was a little bit like I spoke about, like table tennis, so like the spins and figuring out what you do with a racket and your wrist to get the.
Ball to move and risk kind of development.
Like how many of these guys are here this way? If you took them on a table tennis, they just wipe you off the the table, right They just.
In twenty twenty three, Denis. Obviously the athletes are playing golf. Do you think we've reached I mean, Dave, when I had Dave phil Phillips on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about speed and you know, this new rollback of the golf ball, everybody's saying, everybody's going to be hitting the golf ball at you know, two hundred mile an hour, you know, plus club hit our ball speed. Dave thinks that there's a ceiling that you can compete with speed.
Right.
I think the governing bodies and the wider public just say, Okay, speed is killing golf, but the long drive guys, they're not winning golf trumps. Yes, Bryson went on that run, but Bryson is even scaled back what he's done to Where do you think we are in twenty twenty three from an athletic standpoint? But where do you think? What's the ceiling on? How athletic this sport, as golf, as golfers, how athletic can it become?
It's a really interesting question. So it wasn't that long ago we thought no one would ever break the four minute mile, and now college students do it. I think that the way golfers are trained has changed, and they're
all athletes. I don't know whether I would talk about a ceiling, but what I would say is that since we always talk about speed but not so much about efficiency, because I think you can actually get a golf ball going further with moderate increases in speed by moving more efficiently, like knowing musculature, how it all interacts, how you need to move to create a really efficient sequence. And then if you make that faster, I think ball's going to
go even further up. So around that, I think that we probably don't need to open the can of worms around how far the ball goes and golf courses and what we're having to do. But I would think that the sports fundamentally changed. I don't see it going back. I think I think the other thing that we need to look at here is speed is one thing, but it's still a game. There's still an art involved here.
And I look at the best players, and yes, they've they're they're probably within a certain bandwidth of speed, but they've got great control as well. And that's that's where I see it. It's like, you know, speed without control or efficiency ain't gonna work out here unless there's some sort of advancement in equipment that I sort of can't
see just around the corner. So I think there's a there's a job for all of us to do as a as a you know, is working around these players and these developmental players, you know, the sports science community and the sports medicine community, and coaches, you know, high performance coaches around finding that blend of for this player, how does this player need to move? You know, what does the how does that what is their body needs to look like in five years time, how with their physiology,
what's the most efficient way for them to move? And then how fast can they move that way without breaking down physically or injury wise, and have the control they need over the ball golf ball? And can we also teach them like your analogy before with the guy who the footy guy, can they actually have some control over that as well? Like how much control do they need
in the modern game with equipments. That's a whole nother discussion, right, But that would be the way I would see this is just finding what's optimum for each player, because for some of them anyway, I'm probably just going to go over what I just said, But that's probably more the way. The way I see things is we'll get to the stage where we'll just go right, how close well I know this, if you look at look at some of my players, they'll just go right, what's my man acts?
Where does the ball going when I'm going at max? And how do I feel? How far back from that do I back off to get within that bandwidth of distance and control that I want. That's going to be different for every play and every player's program is going to be different, right, but that's kind of the way I see it. With my background and the people I'm fortunate enough to work with or smarter than me, it's just going right for this person with their physiology, this
is their most efficient movement. We can prove that on three D. We can see it in the flight, the players talking about the control they've got, the strike, my good shots, it feels like my good shots going where it should go. The bad shot it should be going there. And then just figure, as I said, figuring out what's
the what's that cruising speed? Where I get that? And that'll be interesting to see whether that bell curve changes over time, right, because I think that's where we're getting to as a community of coaches and sports science and sports medicine people, is we're just going can we shift this more this way? Now? They might roll the golf ball back a bit, but that's not going to stop
that progression. And I think importantly seeking to progress, like we're not all going to go, well, well they've died the golf ball back.
Let's just let's just stare where we go.
Let's just say where we.
Are we want to Adaptah.
And the other thing too, is is if you look at you look at you know, through history, like I look at Nicholas, when you know when Nicholas came out what an athlete? Oh is unbelievable. Man, it's just so much further than everybody else.
Yeah.
So it's not like the game, it's not like all of a sudden we've got you know, better athletes. Is not the word that the game has always had great athletes.
It's just know, we know more about how to create them, I think, and there's more of them, and I think the equipment, the way the equipment is, it's no doubt it's more forgiving that lends itself to sort of pushing that envelope and trying to move that bell curve a little bit, but ultimately coming down the stretch, it's the guys that can that have got the ultimate control and
that art and finesse. There's still an art and finesse in the game right in all aspects of the game, and as coaches, we can't forget that because we live in a very data focused, objective, objective world.
Lastly, Dennis in twenty twenty three, what do you like about golf instruction and the direction it's going and what don't you like or what do you just give what what are some things that kind of give you pause and go h. I don't know about that.
It's a really good question. So when I first started playing as a junior, no one had even a video camera, like I think I was nineteen when I saw swing for the first time. I was horrified by the way because I thought I was a mix of Nicholas Ballistos and Watson and found out that I was nothing like that.
But I think I think back in the day, the best coaches they could look at a ballflight, they could look at the way you were moving, and they could explain to you what was causing that that there weren't many there weren't. I don't think there were a whole lot of those type of guys around. I think a lot of them would go, well, we just we'll change your grip a bit, or we'll change your ball position, or we'll get you to turn more, or we'll get
you to change this. But I think there were some really skilled coaches who could without the use of tech, without the assistance of technology, could work backwards and just go right, that's what's causing that, you need to do this, and the way they went, I think, well, I've certainly lived through an error and as a coach where there are more and more and more, you know, equipment now that will provide information around what's happened.
Data collection, data collection.
So I see a lot of data collection from a lot of different pieces of machinery. But what I'm not sure, but I'm not seeing a lot of This is a shocking general generalization, right, But I don't know too many people who can gather all of that information to do something with it and analyze it. So we live we've lived in it in an era where there's been an explosion in technology and assistance. But I'm not but there's not a lot.
Of really, really really good.
Data analysts who can like process all of that and come up with a coaching coaching information, and then you've got to come up with how you're going to express that to the players. So it's if I use my own experience around that just to sort of define that not just blanket you know, not just a blanket comment. When for example, three D first came out, I was like, I've got to be an expert in three D.
We've got we've got a twelve cents a well, I bought one as well, and I'm not a biomechanas.
Whereas now whereas now I go, you know, what all I need is someone who can look at that, see all of that in their mind and go, right, here's what's happening before those different parts. So the onus on on my on my part is to make sure that I can have a conversation with someone whose world is looking at that sort of thing, right, and their job is to understand that I'm just a golf pro and they need to dumb it down a little bit so that I understand it. So that was I think I've
lived through an era where we had launch moditors. Now it's like, wow, now I've got to understand launch monitors. And then there are people around who can simplify that.
So you can get all of that information and come up with a really complicated scenario of what's going on, or you can have someone who helps you understand exactly what's going on, so you can express something that's complex quite simply to that's sorry, turn something that's quite complex into something quite simple, because then you need to be able to communicate with a player, because at the end of the day, if you hook a player up with three D or you've got a track man running or
force plates or whatever. The play's just going to go, well, right, a coach, what are we going to do? So you can have all the information coming in, but ultimately you've got to come up with there's got to be an output from that. And I think for me as a coach,
that's been the challenge. I think I went as I said, I went through the whole thing of going, holy crap, I've got to be an expert in this, this and this, and I've got to totally understand it all because I've got to be able to talk to my player about it. And I think I've got to the stage now when there's an emerging technology, i'ld call so the guy I use, Ryan Lumston based here in Adelaide. We'll have a conversation around this new technology coming out and it's like, what
do you think is it going to be useful? Is it going to be a coaching result from.
He's effectively doing. He's the research guy. He's immersed in the details, and what you're trying to say is listen, what do you think about this new concept?
And he'll go and police formally educated and.
Then you said, Okay, now, how can I apply that in the real world? And I think that's the important thing that as golf instruction becomes more data driven and more technology driven, you have to be able to do something to affect change with the information that you're getting. Yeah,
I agree, Otherwise you're just getting him. I've always said that, I think we're probably now I think two generations in of just my worry is that we're just creating generations of data collectors and they're just data money and you're like, okay, and they're saying to students, listen, this is I've got one hundred thousand dollars worth of technology. This is what you're doing. The student's going okay, I didn't know now what, Yeah, but this is what you're doing. The technology tells me
this is what you're doing. But the students sitting there going Okay, what the hell do we do now? Because anybody can look at the data and say, hey, you're doing this, you're doing this, you're doing this, this is what's happening. Okay, now what and how do I get better as a golfer with all of this information?
Correct? And that's and if you look at the best teams around, the best players in the world, they're able to not only gather data, that to effectively analyze data and have a discussion and come up with a way forward. And typically by the time that's process you digested, processed, and spat out, it's a fairly simple piece of information
for the player. But for example, the fella I spoke about before, Ryan Lumsden, he's been working on programs that gathered data from from different technologies and he's able to he's getting the stage where he's filtering down the importance for each player he's in the matrix. He's yeah, So he's a very clever man. And as I said, that's like, that's something I could but I'm not unashamed to say
I'm not smart enough to do that. But as if I dial this right back to the to the vis the CEO of the vis A great man by the name of doctor Frank Pike, who sadly passed away a number of years ago. When I got the assistant coach position at the Institute of Sports, so Dale Intwit's head coach, I was assistant coach. He came and sat me down and he said, look, he said, there's only two things
you really need to do in this job. He said, when you get up in the morning, he said, you need to think about, Okay, well, what can I do for my athletes today to help them get better? And he said the second thing I'll say is you've got to surround people who You've got to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and leave your ego at the door. And they are two things that I've that I've tried to do my whole coaching life, and
I think it served me pretty well. At the time, I kind of thought he might have been having a bit of crack, a bit of a crack at me, going, you need to surround yourself with people who are smarter than me. Yeah, right, So anyhow, Yeah.
Well, I think you're one of you know you, Greg Dave, the guys at TPI, you're some of the smartest people I know. And I don't think you guys get nearly enough credit from people like us because you have fundamentally the work that certainly the work that you've done Dennis in junior golf development. When I first was exposed to it, it literally changed everything for me. And it is shaped everything that I have done since then, So I can't
thank you enough. And it's great to be down here in Australia to get a chance to spend some time with you. And we could literally do five hours of this and just go straight down the rabbit hole. We'll get together again soon and do it again. But congrats on all your success and keep doing what you're doing, because you are one of the good ones, and you're one of the best in the world at.
What you do. I will say this justin is just as a final comment or just a final comment, is I've been extremely fortunate in my coaching life to have come across some people who have been just amazing mentors. Is just like you can. I think there's a certain amount of coaching that you dig out of the ground
through trial and error. And I've been extremely fortunate from the moment I started coaching, not only to have great mentors from all around the world, but great mentors who are happy to share and part of that mentoring being challenged by people around the way you think too, right, And I've been extremely fortunate, and i'd count to you amongst those people, Claude, and thanks very much for inviting me to speak, has been a's been terrific.
Absolutely, we I'll see you again soon, all right, buddy. So what a cool opportunity I had to get to spend some time with Dennis. I hope everybody got a lot out of that. Listen, the way we teach junior golfers today versus the way that they were taught, you know, fifteen, twenty, even thirty years ago, is so dramatically different. And when I first met Dennis and I saw the work that he was doing with Greg and Dave at TPI and
went to their junior golf certifications. I think the first one I went to was in Madrid in probably two thousand and maybe nine, maybe I think two thousand and nine, twenty ten. And everybody that works with me, that works for me, has all gone through the TPI Junior Development series.
We have one hundred and eighty kids in our junior program in Dubai and out of Dubai, small little golf market, but in the last ten eleven years, I think we've sent thirty kids to play college golf in the United States. Dubai is a big, big city on the world stage, but as a golf market is a very small small golf market, so for us to find over thirty kids, some of have gone on to play for University of Florida, Ohio State, some excuse me, Oklahoma State, some big, big
programs and we're really proud of that. And it wouldn't be if it wasn't for the work that Dennis has done in junior golf development. Certainly wouldn't have been able to do the stuff we did. So thanks for Dennis to talking to us and to me, it was a really really good one junior golf development. If you haven't thought about it in the way that Dennis talked about it, you definitely should. Can't thank everybody enough for listening, Rate, review,
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You guys know the drill son of a butch comes to you every Wednesday. We will see you next week.