Rankin, Del - Peewee and Parent Class

Property: The First Tee of Yakima

Location: Yakima, WA

Program Contact: Del Rankin

Contact Phone/Email: 509-949-6349, christinam@thefirstteeyakima.org

Name of PD Program: Peewee and Parent Class

Type of PD Program: Junior Golf, Adult Beginner

Details of Program

Thanks to a grant from the PGA Pacific Northwest Section, The First Tee of Yakima was able to offer a four lesson "Peewee and Parent" golf class at Fisher Park Golf Course in Yakima, WA. Fisher Park is a city course and operated under the Yakima Parks and Recreation Department.

This class was designed to augment the First Tee Program offered through the Yakima chapter of The First Tee. The goal was to provide instruction and fun that would encourage adults to go play golf with their children and further increase the success of "growing the game" efforts. The children targeted for this project were five to eight years old.

The Peewee and Parent class was four, one hour sessions offered on Monday evenings. By scheduling evenings, we hoped to find the greatest number of parents/adults free from work schedules. By making the classes just one hour, we kept the time commitment to a minimum for the adults, and sufficiently short enough to maintain the attention of younger children.

Parent/child pairs were introduced to the basics of golf, with an emphasis on: 1. Having Fun and 2.Course Etiquette

The Yakima Parks and Recreation Summer Class Schedule listed the Peewee and Parent class and was sent to the majority of Yakima residents through the mail.

Results of Program

Data was kept on the demographics of families in general, the age of the children, and whether any of the children then continued playing golf with the First Tee program, as well as attendance.

The program was significantly smaller than what we had anticipated, with five parent/child pairs in 2017.

One child did join the First Tee for our Fall session, which is our biggest success with this program. He thoroughly enjoyed the program, and is expected to return to First Tee this summer.

We felt we had insufficient numbers to draw any real conclusions about increasing the time parents and young children played golf on their own time.

Recommendations

This program may be more successful if offered in conjunction with other programming that already has a significant participant base. For example, we plan to offer parent instruction several times over the regular nine week session, during times when the kids are already at lessons. So parents can bring their children to class, and receive instruction alongside him or her, without having to schedule another activity onto the family calendar.