A golf clinic at the Kennedy course provides an unusual opportunity to learn from the very best in golf instruction. We have had many clients over the years who have become better players and more confident lifetime golfers by taking our lessons at the Kennedy course.
Our clientele is a wide range of ages and ability levels, from beginners to experienced professionals. We are also proud of our reputation for helping golfers improve their game by playing it for longer, with less effort and fewer injuries than before.*
We offer a variety of options to fit anyone’s budget: from private lessons to corporate groups, junior clinics to senior golf clinics. Our goal is to help you play your best game every time you step onto the course.*
Our classes include instruction on all aspects of the game, as well as a steady diet of laughs and practical jokes. The lessons are fun and stimulating; they focus on improving one’s performance while having a good time. You will leave with a greater understanding of how to play your best golf, no matter what level you are at.*
All students receive a free lesson at our driving range, which includes two holes of instruction on each green. This gives everyone an opportunity to practice their short game before hitting the course!*
Our instructors’ backgrounds range from being
If you want to improve your golf game, the best place to start is probably the course. A course is an artificial environment that can make it easier to execute certain shots than in your own back yard. It makes it easier for you to practice and learn how to do things. And in general a course has a lot of public playing partners who are better than you, so you don’t have as much time to focus on your mistakes or develop bad habits.
There is one thing you should do when you walk onto a golf course: look out for golf pros. If they are working, they will be better than you at this point in your life. You should do whatever they do, not what they say.
The amateurs who play golf often seem to think the best way to improve their game is to practice it. But that isn’t necessarily true. If you want to improve your golf game, you should try improving something else first, like your score on a test. The test will tell you whether your understanding of golf has improved, and if not, what more you should do.
This is not to criticize amateurs: they may be right in thinking that they can get better at golf by practicing, but they are probably wrong in thinking that they have already gotten as good as they can get.
The golf courses in the United States are not designed well. In particular, they have too much water, and they have slopes that are too steep, which means that the ball comes off the tee too fast and doesn’t carry.
To get around this problem, they make you play with a driver. That’s fine, but it means you have to carry the whole way, so you need a lot of power to get there quickly and stay there.
The best drivers have a big head and a big shaft, but those things weigh about 50 pounds. You can’t swing a club that weighs 50 pounds for more than 100 yards without having your back hurt, which is why most golf courses are short enough so that you can’t get out of jail by hitting driver after driver.
The solution is to build courses with more water and less slope, so that when the ball flies off the tee it is going much slower and carrying less. But that means you need more land per golfer to make sure the course isn’t too crowded.
There’s one simple way to calculate how much land it takes to play golf: divide 100 yards by the exit velocity of your ball, times 100 yards per hole. The answer is about 2 acres per golfer. So if you
In the early 1960s, the Kennedy family built a golf course on the grounds of their home in Palm Beach, Florida. It was called the Links, and it was designed by renowned architect Alister Mackenzie. The course is not especially notable today, just a modest-sized golf course out in the boonies.
But when it opened in 1962, it was revolutionary. It was one of the first courses to have a driving range and practice green (the other being Bobby Jones’ design at Augusta National). To this day, driving ranges are simply not part of most golf courses.
The Links quickly became an important training ground for America’s best amateurs and professionals. Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer both won their first U.S. Open there. Gary Player won his first Masters there (then known as the Tournament Players Championship). Even Tiger Woods has played there a few times. The Olympic gold medalist turned professional golfer Michelle Wie actually grew up playing at the Links and still considers her victory in the 2009 U.S. Women’s Open there one of the highlights of her career.
The Links is also unique in that it has been used to train both amateurs and professionals over time; its 18 holes have changed several times since they were built,
The biggest reason golf is so hard to learn is that it is so hard to play.
This might seem like a silly statement, but I think it’s true. If you can play, you can learn anything–except golf. Only a very few people who are already good at golf have ever learned how to play well enough to become good at golf.
When I was young and learning how to play, I used to get frustrated by how long it took me to get better. I would take lessons and practice and practice, and I could see that the longer I practiced, the better I got. But it still felt like my progress was glacial.
Then one day my father came up behind me with a $5 bill in his hand, which he had just won playing 5-cent slots at a local casino.
“Son,” he said, “I have an offer for you.”
I stared at him blankly.
“Here’s $5,” he said. “I’m going down the street to the slots again, and if I win another $5 you can buy me lunch.”
“If you win?” I asked skeptically. “You don’t even know where those machines are!”
“Yes,” my father said patiently.
Let’s imagine we’re playing a golf match. Each player has 100 points, and the winner gets 100 points.
The first player, who is ahead by 100 points at the first hole, knows that if he wins the next six holes, his opponent will only have 60 points left, and he’ll win the match. So he decides to play defensively; he picks a strategy that keeps his score in the middle at 80 points over a six-hole period. That strategy is called a “zone of competence.” It’s also called “score control.”
Perhaps surprisingly, it can be profitable to play aggressively if you are behind. If you go out on to the green with an opportunity to make birdie, you might as well take it. On the other hand, if your opponent has a chance to score against you on every hole, it doesn’t make much difference if you make one or two pars; there are many more holes until you lose.