Learning to play good golf takes years, and unlike other sports, it’s difficult to gauge when golfers will enter their prime as players mature at different times. Who would have thought that Masters Champion Zach Johnson was not the best player on his high school or college team as he openly admits.
Along similar lines, Angel Cabrera played in 193 PGA Tour tournaments before he went on to win the Masters and U.S. Open. It’s hard to tell when that aha moment will occur when a golfer’s game harmoniously materializes, especially so for college golfers whose games are in constant states of development. In light of such trends, college golf coaches now have a unique opportunity to develop players with the National Collegiate Club Golf Association (NCCGA), a premier competitive tour for non-varsity college golfers with thousands of members at 200+ schools across the country.
The numbers don’t lie, 225,000 students play competitive golf in high school but just over 10,000 of these students go on to play varsity college golf. Walking on is tough especially as collegiate varsity tryouts typically occur over two or three days when students must shoot on par with the recruited players. When a professional misses the cut, he can give it a go next week; when a students fail to make the team, however, they get frustrated, stop practicing, and sometimes quit the game altogether. Traditionally, non-varsity golfers could not afford to play and there was no competitive golf outlet for them to stay in the game. Fortunately those days are long gone as the NCCGA now serves as a farm system for players who are not among the 8-10 students on varsity teams.
Is your campus involved?
NCCGA provides a competitive landscape for college golf club teams by offering regional tournaments and a National Championship each semester (it will host 31 competitive events this in the fall of 2013) and support nearly 200 club golf teams across the country at school such as Ohio State, UCLA, ECU, and The University of Alabama.
Here are a few ways coaches benefit from NCCGA:
1) Keep redshirt students competing at a high level
2) Student can get sick or hurt - NCCGA can provide active replacements with their games sharp
3) Stay ahead of new recruits - University of Texas, for example, lost Jordan Spieth and Brandon Stone early as professionals, NCCGA players can be next in line and ready to play if needed
4) Keep track of the next hidden talent by following student tournament scores in NCCGA events - Tom Duty, a NCCGA graduate, shot 71-73 at the 2012 fall NCCGA national championship Sea Island and recently turned pro.
5) Keep students playing the game and help grow golf at the collegiate level. It is the right thing to do!
** Interested in starting a club team at your campus? Let us know (president@nccga.org) and we’ll do our best to make club golf a reality on your campus for the fall season.
