The First Five Years: Why the Window We Keep Ignoring Is the Most Important One We Have

I have been coaching children for thirty years. In that time, I have built academies across multiple countries, trained hundreds of coaches, developed certification programmes that are now delivered globally, and had the privilege of working alongside some of the most influential figures in golf instruction. I have also watched, year after year, as our industry makes the same fundamental mistake.

We start too late. Not too late to register a child for their first lesson, but too late to understand that by the time most junior programmes even open their doors, typically at age six or seven, the most formative period in a child's athletic and emotional development has already passed.

The window I am talking about runs from age two to age five. Everything we know about how the human brain develops, how motor patterns are laid down, and how children form their emotional relationship with physical challenge points to the same conclusion. The foundations built in these years are the ones that last. Everything we try to build afterwards sits on top of what happened here, whether we were involved in shaping it or not.

TigerTOTS Golf was built entirely from this understanding. It is not junior golf with the volume turned down. It is a purpose-built developmental framework for children aged two to five, and every single element of it — from the way we structure the physical environment to the language a coach uses and the central role parents play at every moment of the session — is designed around how children at this age actually learn and grow.

Before you can coach this age group well, you need to understand what is happening inside the child in front of you. Not at a surface level, but properly.

The brain between ages two and five is forming neural pathways at a rate it will never reach again. The motor system — the architecture that underpins every athletic movement a person will ever make — is being constructed right now. It is being built through movement, exploration, repetition, and play. That is not a poetic description. It is literal, measurable biology.

This is why TigerTOTS is divided into two distinct age groups, and why the difference between them is not simply a matter of naming.

The programme runs in six-week blocks, and this matters more than it might initially seem. A single session is a moment. Six weeks of sessions, each one building on the last, is a developmental arc. The six-week block structure was one of the most important decisions we made in designing TigerTOTS. It forces a discipline that benefits everyone. The coach plans with a developmental arc in mind. The parent sees progress because the same challenges reappear and become easier over time. And the child experiences the single most powerful motivator available to a young athlete: the feeling of getting better at something.

Understanding the structure of TigerTOTS is not complicated, but every element of it is deliberate. Everything has been thought through from the same starting point: what does this specific child, at this specific stage of development, actually need right now?

The physical environment we create is called the golfing playground. It is a purpose-designed circuit of at least nine activity stations, and each parent and child navigate it together as a pair. There is no queue and no line of children waiting for a turn. Families move through the space at their own pace. The coach circulates, observes, encourages, and intervenes gently when needed.

The stations fall into two distinct categories: Physical Literacy stations focused on fundamental movement — balance, coordination, agility, spatial awareness, and body control — and Golf Games stations where golf is the vehicle: target putting, chipping challenges, swing exploration and ball tracking. Every station is framed as a game, never a technical exercise.

What makes this work is the way the activities scale. The same station can serve a two-year-old and a four-year-old by simply adjusting the parameters. A putting target that is thirty centimetres wide and one metre away for Group One becomes fifteen centimetres wide and two metres away for Group Two. Throughout all of it, at every station in both groups, the parent is present. Not watching. Not waiting. Doing it alongside their child.

The research on early childhood development is unambiguous about one thing: the years between two and five are when the foundations of athletic competence are either built or left unbuilt. The motor patterns laid down in this period, the child's emotional relationship with physical challenge, their sense of themselves as capable and willing movers — these things do not wait for us to get organised.

We cannot go back and build what we did not build. We can work with what we have after five, six, seven — and we do, and that work has real value. But we are always building on whatever happened before we arrived.

The question TigerTOTS asks is not "how early can we start teaching golf?" It is "how can we make absolutely certain that the years between two and five do the work those years are designed to do?" The golf is there. The clubs are there. The targets and the games and the challenges are all there. But the thing we are actually building is a child who moves well, who tries things without fear, who associates physical challenge with joy rather than pressure, and who has experienced, from the very beginning, what it feels like to be cheered on by the person they love most in the world.

That is what TigerTOTS is for. And those years are the only time we get to build it properly.