My Number One Tip for Junior Golfers

The Core Principle

I have spent more than three decades coaching golf, and in that time I have worked with just about everyone you can imagine. Two-year-olds picking up a club for the first time, tour professionals fighting to keep their cards, and more or less every stage in between. I have built junior programmes on three continents and trained coaches all over the world, which has given me a front-row seat to thousands of children arriving into this game full of enthusiasm.

That experience has led me to a conclusion I hold with real conviction: junior golf does not have a talent problem. It has a development model problem. The children themselves are absolutely fine. It is the way we tend to treat them that lets them down.

When people ask me for my number one tip for junior golfers, they are usually expecting something about the grip, the takeaway, or which drills they ought to be running. They tend to look surprised when I tell them, and then, more often than not, they realise it is something they already half knew but had never quite given themselves permission to act on.

Here is the critical part: in that moment, the outcome genuinely does not matter. If it turns out well, wonderful. If it turns out badly, that is honestly even better, because a bad outcome that truly belongs to the child is one of the most valuable things in their whole development. It is the raw material that learning is made from. The trouble is that the moment we step in, whether by correcting them before the mistake can happen or by explaining it away the second it does, we quietly remove the very thing that would have helped them grow.

Give the child ownership of their situation, and trust them with the outcome. I have built my entire coaching philosophy on that one idea. Everything that follows is simply a way of putting it into practice.

What I Have Watched Happen, Over and Over

I see the same pattern on driving ranges and golf courses all over the world. Dubai, London, Kuala Lumpur, Florida. The accents change but the pattern never does.

A child hits a shot, and before the ball has even come down, an adult voice arrives to tell them what went wrong. "You lifted your head." "Slow down." "What did I tell you about your grip?" And in that instant something important is lost. The child had been about to watch the ball, register what actually happened, and form a thought of their own about it. Instead, they turn away from the ball and towards the adult. The moment they make that turn, everything I care about as a coach has slipped away.

Do that a few hundred times and you end up with a very particular kind of child. One who hits a shot and looks straight at you rather than at the ball. They are not wondering what happened to the shot. They are wondering whether you are pleased with them. That is the precise moment a young golfer stops being developed and starts being managed.

Although it is the beginning of the end, the end itself can take years to arrive. When it does, it shows up as the fourteen-year-old who has quietly stopped enjoying the game, or the sixteen-year-old who seizes up over any shot that matters because they were never once allowed to fail in peace, or simply the child who drifts away from golf altogether.

Here is what thirty years has taught me beyond any doubt: the children who survive all this and go on to thrive are almost never the most talented ones. They are the ones who were allowed to own their own experience, the whole of it. The good shots and the bad ones, the decisions and the mistakes and the small discoveries along the way.

The Science Behind It

I arrived at these conclusions through decades of watching what actually works with real children on real golf courses. But it has always mattered to me that what I teach holds up against the best research available. I am glad to say that it does.

The psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci developed Self-Determination Theory, one of the most thoroughly tested frameworks in motivational science. At its heart it identifies three things every human being needs to grow, stay motivated, and feel genuinely well: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy — the sense that you are genuinely the author of your own behaviour and that your decisions truly belong to you — is not optional. It is a fundamental psychological need, and when it is supported, children flourish. When it is taken away, however lovingly, their development quietly suffers.

The developmental psychologist Carol Dweck spent much of her career studying how children respond to challenge and failure. Her work on growth mindset — the idea that ability is something built through effort rather than fixed at birth — has been enormously influential. What the wider body of evidence supports consistently is that children who are allowed to wrestle with difficulty without being rescued from it develop far healthier responses to failure than those who are constantly steered away from it.

In sport specifically, research confirms what every good junior coach already feels in their bones. Coaches who build environments in which young athletes genuinely own their own decisions end up producing athletes who are more resilient, more motivated, and far better equipped for the long haul. Not necessarily better by the end of next month, but better in the way that quietly compounds over years.

The Framework for the Weekend

None of this philosophy is worth anything if you cannot actually use it on a Saturday morning. So let me give you exactly what I hand to the parents and coaches I work with. When you take a young child out to play golf for the first time, here is how I would set the round up.

The first thing I would do is adjust the distances. Not because the game is wrong, but because the human being playing it is small. Make par 3s play at around 100 yards, par 4s at 150, and par 5s at 200. You are not changing the game. You are making it proportionate to the small human being who is actually playing it. Suddenly par becomes something a child can genuinely reach, which means success is available to them right from the first tee.

We would never dream of asking a seven-year-old to play football on a full-size pitch with a full-size goal. So there is no good reason to do the equivalent in golf.

Three Non-Negotiables

These three constraints might feel restrictive. They are not. They are liberating. Because the moment you remove them, the moment you stop trying to coach during the round and instead let the child own the experience, something remarkable happens. The child's attention stays on the ball. Their curiosity stays alive. Their own learning system engages. And by the end of nine holes, they have taught themselves something real about what happens when you hit a golf ball.

Why This Matters

This is bigger than golf, and it is bigger than sport. The question of how we respond when a young person runs into difficulty is one that shapes not just their relationship with golf, but their approach to challenge for the rest of their lives.

There are two paths. One says: your job is to protect the child from difficulty. Remove the obstacles. Explain away the failures. Steer them carefully around anything that might hurt. That path produces children who are dependent on external validation and terrified of situations they cannot control.

The other path says: your job is to create a space in which the child can meet difficulty and own it. Not rescue them from it. Not explain it away. Let them feel it, learn from it, discover what they are capable of in the face of it. That path produces children who are resilient, motivated, and genuinely equipped to thrive.

Golf gives us one of the finest laboratories on earth for this kind of learning. Every single shot demands a decision. Every single outcome is immediate, visible, and completely real. There is nowhere to hide. And the child can see exactly what happened, provided of course that we let them look.

This is my number one tip for junior golfers. Not a technique. Not a drill. Not even a specific approach to the game. Just a principle about how we respond when a young person encounters difficulty. Give them ownership. Trust them with the outcome. And watch what that produces.