Speaker 1: This is Phil Shub from Ely in Cambridgeshire in the
United Kingdom, and I play at Ely City Golf Club.
This is Golf Smart episode nine to seven to six.
Speaker 2: I was in Oregon last week doing a training like
you can spit off in fifteen seconds what it is,
and you just have a couple catchwords for them like welcome, Matt,
like something that they understand, and then they're like, oh, okay,
you're just like karate. Yeah, yeah, levels move them through.
Everybody starts a white belt, and the days of like
explaining a lot to people, at least in my experience,
are so far gone. It's like, if you don't have
something good to say in twenty or thirty seconds, they're
going to tune you out. And if you want to survive,
you got to be good at your fifteen twenty second
elevator pitch. A turning point for us was when we
changed our name. We used to have a really long
name that didn't make any sense, and then we went
to another name that didn't make any sense, and another
name that didn't make any sense, and our fourth name,
Operation six. I remember pitching it to a couple members
at the course to see if they understood what it
was and they're like, oh, okay, so you're on a
operation to try to shoot thirty six and you start
close and you move back. That makes sense. And when
the member repeated that back, I was like, all right,
we got a name.
Speaker 3: The Welcome Matt to golf for beginners of any age
Operation thirty six with founder Ryan Daily. This is Golf Smarter,
sharing stories, tips and insights from great golf minds to
help you lower your score and raise your golf IQ.
Speaker 4: Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome to the Golf Smarter Podcast. Ryan.
Speaker 2: Hello, Fred, how are you? I'm great? Another great day
in North Carolina.
Speaker 3: Ah, how often it's just a you know, kind of
a given, isn't it?
Speaker 4: Another great day in North Carolina.
Speaker 2: It's a place to be if you love golf.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: A couple a couple episodes ago, I was having a
conversation with Joel Suggs, Master PGA Instructor, and.
Speaker 4: Operation thirty six came up and I'm like, wait, what's
Operation thirty six?
Speaker 3: And he oh, it's a great way. It's like, all right,
have I gotta have that guy on the show. So
he introduced us and here we are. I'm so excited
to hear about Operation thirty six. Why don't you give me,
give me your not even an elevator pitch, just give
me the overview of what it is and how you
got it started.
Speaker 2: Sure, so, myself and Matt Reagan, another PGA professional, started
in two thousand and ten together working on this. There's
a pretty long backstory. We don't have to go into
a ton of it on why we started, how we started,
but we had a goal of bringing kids to the
golf course at a golf course that didn't have a
lot of people using it at the time, right after
the real estate recession. We pitched an idea to the
president of the university. The president of the university approved it.
We started with three kids. I think in the program
we had twenty parents in front of us at the
golf course. We pitched what we were going to do,
and basically what it was was gymnastics or karate for golf.
We were just bringing them out every Monday. At the time,
there wasn't really a consistent junior golf program that ran
throughout the year. Back in twenty ten, the main thing
was like summer camps. So like if you had a
son or a grandson and you wanted to get them
into the game, you'd bring them to a summer camp,
and the only other option was to take a private
lesson with a PGA pro, and those two options didn't
seem to do as well as what other sports were doing,
so we borrowed some concepts from them to get started,
and then got really frustrated after our fourth or fifth
year doing it because we had a ton of kids coming.
We had like eighty kids coming once a week, not
all at the same time, at different class times, for
eight months out of the year, but nobody was really
like falling in love with playing the game of golf
like they would come because their parents brought them, But
it was like pulling teeth to get them to really
like enjoy the aspects of golf that really hooked us,
and for me in particular, it was the walking outside.
It was trying different clubs, It was hitting the ball
in the hole and listening to that sound like I
think about that when I was a kid, and those
things really resonated with me. Playing with the older men
at the golf course was really fun for me to
learn from them, and there wasn't a great avenue in
our area to do that, and we certainly after four
or five years, didn't do very well at that either.
So we had to retool everything we did to figure out,
you know, instead of taking them on the driving range
as their first experience in the game of golf and
teaching him the grip and teaching him how to stand,
which is not fun for anybody, even the golf pro.
It's not very fun because nobody's getting it in the air,
we said, why don't we put them on the golf
course first and see what happens? And we did. We
put them on the tea box, and that was extremely
frustrating beginner golfers from the tea box taking twelve strokes
to get in the hole. So then after a year
frustration of that, we said, well, what if we started
them like basketball, start with a layup instead of starting
with a three pointer, because we were basically starting a
three pointer at the tea box. So we started them
twenty five yards away from the hole. We said, after
a while of trial and error, we said every hole
was a part four. If you make a three, it's
your first birdy Ever, if you make it two, it's
an eagle. And why don't we throw a number around, Okay,
thirty six, let's see if you could shoot thirty six
for nine holes. And trying that for four or five
years up until right before COVID was really successful. And
when I say successful meaning folks fell in love with
playing the game, and when we weren't there teaching class,
they were there with mom and dad playing and we
had something that worked because it wasn't just because they
were signed up for a class. They were coming out
when there wasn't a class. So I don't know if
anything we do is like rocket science. A lot of
it is just we tested things that didn't work, got
really frustrated and didn't give up, which we could have
given up, and we tried something else, and tried something else,
and tried something else and it ended up working. And
then other coaches in the state of North Carolina started
contacting us because they wanted to do what we do
and making a long story significantly shorter, there's now eight
hundred facilities in fifteen different countries, and there's like twelve
or fourteen hundred coaches running out thirty six throughout the world.
And like some great stories of kids and now adults
that do op thirty six where they the biggest skill
that they learn for it is like you go out
and you shoot a forty five, and you figure out
how to deal with disappointment, deal with no reaching the goal,
which is the whole point of the program. The point
of the program is not to beat thirty six in
your first try. The point of the program is to
go out and not beat thirty six and challenge yourself,
I can get better. And that's really why OP thirty
six works because people look in the mirror and they
say I can do this, I can get one stroke better,
and then they do it with the help of a professional,
with their facility during their practices, or with mom and dad.
And we're trying to compete with video games. It's not easy,
no at all. So we just try to go for
like small wins and if we can get players to
get one stroke better every couple weeks, that's our best
chance to try to compete with video games.
Speaker 3: Have you ever tried to develop an Operation thirty sixth
video game.
Speaker 2: We have gone down that path twice. We haven't gotten
to the finish line yet. We do have an app
people use in OP thirty six where they they take
their lessons online. They can watch videos of different parts
of the curriculum. There's a pretty cool GPS on there
where if you went out to the course with me
and let's say you're playing from twenty five yards, you
and I would walk out to twenty five yards, it
would buzz and say, hey, drop your ball here and
I'll tell you exactly where to drop it on the course.
Speaker 4: Nice.
Speaker 2: But we've been down the video game route twice for
whatever reason, we haven't finished the journey yet. Maybe we'll
be starting it again. I'm not sure. That's a pretty
big animal to tackle.
Speaker 3: Yes it is, Yes it is, But you want people
out on the golf course.
Speaker 4: You don't want to keep them on the video.
Speaker 2: Game, right, correct, one hundred percent. Yeah, And at the
majority of our facilities we're starting to run into If
you were asked me, like, what's the biggest challenge right now,
there's so many people at the golf course where they're
running out thirty six Now we're dealing with the golf
course being too crowded, which if we rewind to twenty ten,
right after the recession, that would be a problem all
of us would have been excited to have because nobody
a golf course at that time, not nobody, but significantly
less than now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and what about since COVID when golf exploded, did
what happened with OP thirty six?
Speaker 2: Then our participation rates skyrocketed because we're a beginner golf
program and there were a lot of folks who had
never played golf before and they wanted to get started
in the game of golf. And we just happened to
have the right marketing at the right time. And when
people plugged online into Google, it says, I want to
learn how to play golf. I'm a beginner golfer. OP
thirty six popped up and by that point we had
five or six hundred facilities, and we just kept getting
notes from our coaches. Hey, Ryan, we're full. You can't
send any more people to us. We're full.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's participation rates have grown steadily from COVID
as well. So it's an interesting industry challenge that we
have now, is that.
Speaker 4: And it's continuing to climb.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think we were up twelve thousand enrollments this
year from last year something like that. So it's.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's phenomenal, it's great.
Speaker 2: It's it's when we get in when we get in
conversations with like industry leading companies and organizations like USGA
Golf Course Owners Association, it's like, guys, we probably need
to at some point build golf courses to start keeping
up with this demand. But then they're like, well we
and they go through the litany of things that make
it a challenge to continue to build more golf courses.
So then it goes to the indoor question, right, indoor golf,
And yeah, the industry is in an interesting spot, a
good spot, very healthy, a lot of participation, equipment sales
are higher than they've ever been. So yeah, it'd be
really interesting to see what happens to golf in the
next fifteen or twenty years with this much demand.
Speaker 3: You mentioned earlier you spoke to the president of the
university and which university and were you intending to create
a curriculum?
Speaker 2: So I worked at Campbell University, like the soup, Campbell's
tomato suit, Campbell University, and we're just south of Raleigh,
North Carolina. And in twenty ten we were called into
a meeting in the basement of the religion building on campus,
which typically means you're about to lose your job and
I went down the elevator with my boss and sat
in front of the knights of the roundtable and they
basically said, you need to get people at the golf
course or we're going to close our thirty six hole
facility unless you have an idea of how to get
people on the golf course. And as we were riding
up the elevator after the meeting, my boss turned to
me and said, hey, do you have any ideas? And
I said, yeah, I kind of do. I've been working
on this idea for quite some time. I've just had
my first child in two thousand and nine. If you
allow me to put this proposal together, I'd love to
give it a shot. And I put together like a
forty something page proposal, put it on his desk, and
it sat for six to nine months, something like that,
and then the president came down the hallway at one
point and went into my boss's office. After he left,
my boss came down and said, hey, you know that
idea you had, I need you to try it.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: That's how it started. And I knew I couldn't do
it alone. I was working full time for the university
as a faculty member, so I grabbed one of my
students to help me, Matt Reagan, I think he was
a sophomore junior at the time, and we just went
at it. The nice thing is we were very lucky
that neither of us had to make money. He was
a college student, I already had a job. And if
somebody asked what were some of the lucky things that
happened to keep this going, that was probably number one,
because every time that we made like five thousand dollars,
we'd put it right back into the business. Make five
thousand dollars, put it back into the business. And we
did that for I don't think we took a paycheck
for six years, seven years something like that.
Speaker 4: Wow, well, at least you had that option that.
Speaker 2: You could one hundred percent. And I think if we
had to make money and it was all about the money,
we never would have survived. But it was more about
It was more about the pursuit of solving a problem.
Was so intriguing to us. It was so interesting to us,
and every time that we ran up against a roadblock,
it kind of got more exciting because it was like, oh,
so you're going to throw that at us, Let's figure
this out, and that's kind of our mindset early on
was very good. It was very fresh, it was very exciting,
and that's that got us through the first five, six,
seven years. And now we've been at it for fifteen years,
almost fifteen years we've been doing this.
Speaker 4: So wow.
Speaker 3: It reminds me of I was John Madden's courting engineer
for a number of years and he always used to say,
don't worry about the horse being blind, just load the wagon.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: And you are a perfect example of that.
Speaker 3: It's like, okay, if you have this challenge, do you
quit or you go around it? And you just barrel
through it and you seem to have successfully done that,
and it's you're very lucky because you didn't need to
make that money. You could put it back into the
business where some people will, you know, come up with
a new tea and leave everything else behind, thinking that
they can make a living on creating a new tea.
Speaker 4: This was congratulations on that.
Speaker 2: Thank you for I appreciate This was John Mann and
the football guy. Yeah, oh wow, yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was amazing.
Speaker 3: Anyway, have you had uh well, let me ask you
about you said you were.
Speaker 4: A faculty member at this university, teaching golf.
Speaker 2: I was, yes, So there's sixteen. There was sixteen universities
around the US that had PGA golf management programs.
Speaker 4: Okay, golf management, sure.
Speaker 2: Yep, where high school students can enroll. They can get
a business degree and then their major would be PGA
Golf management and they could graduate with their class APGA card.
And when I graduated, I tried to play professional golf
for a couple of years. Figured out that wasn't for me.
I wasn't good enough. And then I taught for a
while in Texas. And then when I came back to
North Carolina, who was my boss called me up and said, hey,
would you like a job. And I was like, I'm
still trying to play. I'm still trying to teach. He's like, Ryan,
you probably need to start settling down, and I was
like okay. So then in two thousand and seven I
started at the university. Loved it, loved teaching, loved being
in the classroom, loved being around the younger students. That
kept me young. Being around a college campus is fantastic.
Ton of amenities, football teams, basketball teams. But I just
kept being drawn kind of towards the end to running
this program and felt like there was some there was
some need in the industry that if we kind of
let this thing fizzle out, probably not the best decision.
So that was a tough call going in and you know, saying, hey,
I think I'm going to move on from this job
that I really enjoyed, that I love that, I love
the students, but in twenty sixteen it was time to
walk away and do full time and certainly misteaching at
the university level. But you can't have everything, So.
Speaker 4: You move on, Yes, you do. You must move on.
Speaker 3: Is this does your program compete with the First Tea program?
Speaker 4: Where is it a compliment?
Speaker 2: We are a little bit different than the First Tea
And there's some First Tea locations that run off thirty six,
so I wouldn't say that we're competitors. The First Tea
doesn't unbollievably good job of teaching the life skills and
getting folks to try golf and go through their curriculum.
Do they get them on the golf course as much
as they would like know? And they would admit to that,
and that's why they reach out to us for help
in getting people on the golf course. A good way
to view this is like OP. Thirty six is the
welcome matt to the game of golf, and then after
somebody gets somewhat proficient at playing the game, they could
shoot thirty six from maybe let's say our first three
or four levels. Step two would be PGA Junior League.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but that's
a pg of America program. They do a wonderful job
at over twenty five hundred locations around the country where
you're in a two person team, two to three person team,
you have uniforms on, and you compete at different golf
courses around your area. And then step three in our
kind of roadmap, Op thirty six PGA Junior League would
be like your high school team or a local junior tour,
like a US Kids Golf Tour type thing. And that's
what we try to explain to parents is that I
wouldn't try all of them at once. I would start
without thirty six, Get your feet wet, get comfortable at
a local program with your golf pro with your arm
around you helping you. Then go to junior league, and
then go to the next step.
Speaker 4: Interesting have you had.
Speaker 3: Have you been approached by sponsors, you know, a big
name golf company saying we'd like to associate our name
with this. Can we whether it be US Kids Club
or Callaway or you know something titleist you know, put
their name and if they approached you, would you be
open to that.
Speaker 2: We have not been approached by an equipment company officially. Unofficially,
we have a couple of times, and we are also
in the process of coming out with a solution in
the equipment space with a manufacturer, so that hopefully is
going to continue to move down to the finish line.
Our biggest person that had reached out to us would
be Rory McIlroy recently reached out and did a spot
for us on the Golf Channel on Golf Pass and
he did a five I think it was five segments
with Lauren Thompson from the Golf Channel on starting the
game of golf using up thirty six. And Rory has
a daughter that he's trying to get into the game
of golf, and I think when he saw op thirty
six he saw some of our metrics, like, it's pretty cool.
I can see all of us at out thirty six,
can see of the two hundred thousand people around the
world doing OP thirty six. You can see demographics, you
can see ages, you can see scores, and our demographics
are very girl friendly, lady friendly for adults. So I
think when Rory started to hear about that, he was like, man,
that's a great way to get my daughter involved. It
was great to meet him and watch him do his
thing on camera back in January and Florida. And that
will probably be the biggest one bread.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is that is an incredible endorsement, and it's
on your website.
Speaker 4: Operation thirty six.
Speaker 3: Dot golf is your website and you can see the
Rory video there and it's wonderful and it makes it
so easy to understand at that point they did.
Speaker 2: A wonderful job on production.
Speaker 4: They really did. They really did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's part of the beauty of this program
is it's not that difficult to understand. You really have
created something that cuts all you know, cuts out all
the noise.
Speaker 2: The explanation and the understanding, as we have learned over
the years, has to be spot on. It has to
be an a plus if you're going to have a
chance to survive. And so we everything from our name
Operation thirty six to our tagline, to our twenty second
elevator pitch, all of that has been refined. Like I
don't even know how many times what version we're on,
but like now when I get in an elevator with somebody,
or I was in Oregon last week doing a training,
like you can spit off in fifteen seconds what it is,
and you just have a couple catchwords for them like
welcome Matt, like something that they understand and then they're like,
oh okay, you're just like Karate're like yeah, yeah, levels
move them through. Everybody starts at white Belt, and the
days of like explaining a lot to people like are,
at least in my experience, are so far gone. Like
nobody wants to listen to more than twenty seconds or
thirty seconds, Like if you don't have something good to
say in twenty or thirty seconds, like they're going to
tune you out. And COVID accelerated that. I know that.
I see it with my kids, like attention spans have shrunk,
and if you want to survive, you got to be
good at your fifteen twenty second elevator pitch. And a
turning point for us was when we changed our name.
We used to have a really long name that didn't
make any sense, and then we went to another name
that didn't make any sense, and another name that didn't
make any sense, and our fourth name, operation thirty six.
I remember pitching it to a couple of members at
the course to see if they understood what it was,
and they were like, oh, okay, so you're on an
operation to try to shoot thirty six and you start
close and you move back. That makes sense and that
When the member repeated that back, I was like, all right,
we got a name.
Speaker 3: Okay, So we left with a cliffhanger. And the obvious question,
I hope not just for me, is what were the
other names?
Speaker 4: What did you start out with?
Speaker 2: So the first name we had the best way to
visualize this is we used to take paper checks for
tuition from parents and they couldn't fit it on the line.
It was so long. It was called it was called
North Carolina, the state North Carolina, long Term Athlete Development.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, yeah, it's a couple of academics coming up with.
Speaker 2: A name, right. It's not creative people, No, it was not.
And I think if you were asked, Matt, I think
I kind of voted for that as an academic right
because you're trying to make it sound great. But and
then to try to put that on a T shirt,
to put that on a hat like that was absolutely
not a win. And then the next name we did
was the Edge E D G E. The Edge. And
the challenge in our local area is that I think
there's a plumbing or electrician that's also named like the
Edge plumbing. So it was completely confusing with.
Speaker 3: The famous guitar player. Yeah right, wasn't he on YouTube?
Guitar player for YouTube?
Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
Speaker 4: I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, Okay, And why the
what did the edge supposed to mean?
Speaker 2: We were trying to appeal to too many things. We
were trying to show parents that we would go over
nutrition and fitness, that we would go over golf, that
we go over athletic skills, and go over something else.
So we tried to figure out, how can we show
them that we were over the edge or up to
the edge on training something like that.
Speaker 4: It didn't work, It still doesn't work.
Speaker 2: It's not great. And then we did.
Speaker 5: Let's see so in twenty fourteen, fifteen sixteen, the thing
was to put the letter I lowercase I in front
of whatever you did to kind of like apple right.
Speaker 2: So we were I grow golf, I go golf for
a little while, but that didn't make too much sense,
especially when we started to expand outside of North Carolina
to other states and training other coaches. It just didn't
make a lot of sense. We were, by trial and air,
figured out a way to narrow the name down to
Operation thirty six Golf, and the stick is that like
two hundred thousand people around the world are on the
same operation, the same challenge as you. You're all trying
to beat the golf course. You're not trying to beat
each other. Which that line to moms is super powerful
because the mom who's getting their daughter or son into
the game, their biggest fear is that it's going to
be too competitive and they're not going to fall in
love with the game. So we try as best as
we can to say it's not Fred versus Ryan, it's
Fred and Ryan versus the golf course. And I want
Fred to beat thirty six just as much as I
want to beat thirty six. And if Fred beats thirty six,
I want to give him a high five because I'm
excited for him, and if I do it, he's going
to do it for me. So it creates this environment
like golf course which is pretty cool where like twenty
or thirty people show up every Saturday night to play
in a nice whole event and it's not ultra competitive,
it's more encouraging. Might be the better way to say it.
Speaker 4: What do you mean every Saturday night? What is that?
What did you just throw in there?
Speaker 2: So in OP thirty six is a program, right that
you would sign up for somebody would sign up for.
And in this program, there are two things that you do. One,
the coach is going to have a one hour class
with you, small group class with five or six people
looking on short game, working on full swing, whatever the
curriculum calls for. And then the second thing that that
coach does is they put on a formal nine hole
event twice a month. So at our golf course here
in North Carolina, on Saturday night, every other week, we
have a nine hole event where twenty or thirty people come,
the golf professionals. The course runs an official nine hole event.
We have scorecards, and if we beat thirty six during
that official nine whole event, then we move from level
one to level two, so you can't move on and
out thirty six playing casually. We have found through testing
that when you let folks go out with their grandparents
or they go out with their parents, you don't have
as much control of the rules. Maybe the best way
to say it. So when they beat thirty six, sometimes
you're like, did they really beat it? So then we said,
all right, it's got to be in a formal nine
whole event that the coach puts on for you to
advance through the different levels.
Speaker 4: Yep, okay, okay. So it's not just for kids though.
Speaker 3: You have adults who are also being introduced to golf
who are stepping onto that welcome Matt and I love that.
By the way, that's probably the name of this episode
is something about the welcome Matt. But you have adults
being able to participate as well being introduced.
Speaker 4: To the game. Yeap.
Speaker 2: That wasn't our intention. Fort really was the kids. Because
my son was born, I wanted to have an environment
for him to grow up in with other kids. It
was like in year six or seven, a couple of
the moms tapped us on the shoulder and said, hey, Ryan,
my son loves this. I've never seen him love something before,
like he loves golf. Can you teach us how to
play the game of golf the same way that you're
teaching my son. And originally we were like, you know what,
we're just a kids organization. We stick with juniors. But
then when like three moms come up and they say, hey,
the three of us want to take a class together,
will you please do this for us, and we're like,
all right, we'll do the same thing we do with
the kids with you. And they loved it. Like they
went out and they played on a Saturday night. They
shot like a forty three their first time out. They
took that scorecard, but they shot forty three. They brought
it home, they showed it to their husband, who can't
shoot forty three. They loved it, and they came back
next week and they said, coach, I can't wait to
shoot forty two, forty one, forty and visualize this for
this is from twenty five yards away, right, So they're
taking like a pitching ledge and they might chunk it,
which is okay, we all do that. They might lay
it on the green and then they might miraculously tuput
from ten feet and they've made their first par Ever,
we've had people like blade it hit, the pin goes
like a foot away, they knock it in for their
first eagle and they are just ecstatic. Right, So we
all we've done is just taken this beautiful game of
golf and just shrunk it down to this small, bite
sized beginning step in hopes we don't succeed one hundred
percent of the time, but in hopes that somebody will
enjoy the true joy of golf, which is shooting a
number and coming back going I think I can do
better if I practice a little bit more. And then
they practice a little bit more, they shoot a thirty nine,
and the day they shoot thirty six, they're super excited.
But the cool part is once they beat thirty six,
they know that the next goal is to go back.
Yardage makes the golf course harder, So they go back
to fifty yards and they try to do it again,
and then one hundred yards, and they keep going back,
and we've had some people go all the way back
to the back teas at the course thirty five hundred
yards and they've been in the program for seven, eight
nine years, just continuing to work back to the tea
box at the golf course.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm thinking about my wife who doesn't play golf,
because she keeps saying I don't care.
Speaker 4: About putting a ball in the hole. You know. It's like,
you know, it's like because.
Speaker 3: She's not competitive in any in that way, but I
can see her getting excited about but I did it.
I got a par for twenty five yards, because then
it's like within her skill set, right, I mean, like,
she goes, I'll play nine hole with you. I'm like, yeah,
but if we're going to play nine holes, I want
you to go hit some balls first. I don't want
you to just walk on the golf course without it.
And she goes, no, I don't want to do that.
It's like, okay, then let's not do this, please, let's
not do this. So but once they achieve thirty six
on the nine holes at twenty five yards, they.
Speaker 4: Do move back trying to achieve thirty six each distance.
Speaker 2: Yep, is that how that works? Yeah? So we have
ten total levels. So if you think about the belt
system in karate, I think they have twelve belts. We
have ten levels. Somebody starts at twenty five yards level one.
That means every hole for nine holes is approximately twenty
five yards away. Okay, Now, if the superintendent puts the
pin like really far back, it might be forty yards.
If they puts it really far forward, it might be
fifteen yards. It's about twenty five. Once they beat thirty six,
it might take them three or four attempts. They go
back to level two fifty yards to the center of
the green, and then they keep moving back one hundred yards,
one fifty, two hundred front tees, silver teas, all the
way back to We have ten levels in the program,
and I would say the most popular levels is people
usually go one through five and then they move on
to either private lessons, or they move on to PGA
Junior League, or they move on to the next step.
But for the first year or two, we do a
I think we do as good of a job as
anybody as making that first year or two really fun
for somebody and gets them hooked on the game. When
they're at Christmas parties, they can tell people that they've
played golf and they've shot a decent score, and they've
had a birdie and they've had a par They don't
have to be that guy that says, I'm horrible at golf.
I shoot one hundred and fifty. But the interesting thing,
and I'll bring it up to you, is like we
do very well with juniors, We do very well with ladies.
The demographic that we don't do great with, which I
completely understand, is men. They don't want to start close
to the whole. They want to be on the black teams,
even if they shoot one hundred and ten. But we're
slowly getting in roads in the men's demographic, especially in
Florida with the older crowd that feels like maybe they're
not they don't hit it far enough to enjoy the
course anymore. We're having success at facilities and getting people
restarted in the game at twenty five yards away then
fifty in one hundred.
Speaker 3: That way, No wonder if seniors would appreciate having that opportunity,
and seniors who've been playing golf long time. You just say,
I think that was kind of the idea of play
it forward, like right, yep.
Speaker 2: And I think the only thing that we did differently
than play it forward was we expanded fast enough that
we attached a number to it. But then we also
could say, Fred, you're not the only person doing it.
There's eighty other people here that are doing there's two
hundred thousand around the country that are doing this. Like
you're not the only one play it forward. I think
was tough because you didn't want to be the only
one moving forward. But if there's twenty people out there
Saturday night, like pace a play is awesome. Like these
folks play in an hour and fifteen minutes, Like they
play fast and they get done and then they have
a meal at the course with their family and the
golf course loves it. Why because food and beverage goes
up because every Saturday night everybody wants to celebrate and
eat at the course, and rounds are up at these places,
and it's it's been fun to watch, it really has.
Speaker 3: So it sounds like it only works on nine hole courses.
You don't do this on eighteen whole courses. And are
they mostly you know, I can't imagine, you know, private courses,
resort courses, country clubs. Some country clubs may have a
nine whole course that they can participate. Tell me the
scope of what kind of courses that you get involved
and do you approach or do they come to you?
Speaker 2: Okay, So the course. There are eighteen hole, thirty six
hole fifty four hole facilities that do OP thirty six.
They just do it on one of the nine holes
I see right, So they maybe like, we have three
nine hole courses here at our facility. So maybe in
the month of November we play the Orange course in
the Black course, maybe the next month we play the
White course. In the Black course, we just do nine holes.
We put markers in the fairway for folks to play
from the different yardages, and they just walk up and
play from those yardages. Are three courses do very well
with OP thirty six, even the ones that are artificial turf,
they do a very good job with OP thirty six.
Resort courses, you nailed it. That's a little bit harder
for us, just because the golf pro doesn't see the
person more than maybe that weekend or more than a
week But our split private versus public golf courses is
stronger in private facilities private golf courses than it is
in public currently. Why because public golf courses right now,
for the most part, are very very crowded, and to
get beginners on the golf course or to find a
teaching pro, because that's currently, you can't do OP thirty
six officially unless you do it with or through a
golf professional of course. So like private golf clubs, for
the most part in the US usually have a pretty
good staff of assistant pros teaching pros that they could
run a program like this, we're running into challenges at
public golf courses where maybe they just have a head pro,
they don't have an assistant or a teaching pro. But
we are seeing just observing the market and as it's
talking to us the independent contry, people that raise their
hand and say I want to teach are starting to
increase at public facilities where they'll approach a golf course
and they'll say, hey, I want to run OP thirty six.
Can I pay you a revenue share of what I
do and I'll run up thirty six. So it'll be
interesting again to observe how the market ads and flows,
but mostly we're at private courses. Publics are starting to
grow a little bit more and the way that people
start in OP thirty six is a golf professional. We'll
call us or go on the website and they'll say, hey,
I want to run OUT thirty six. Our sales team
will go through and give them a demo to see
if it's something that they want to do. And we
also have moms and dads that'll reach out to us
and say, Hey, I live in Spokane, Washington. My daughter
really wants to get involved in the game of golf
throughout thirty six. But I look on your map and
there's no facilities. Will you guys reach out to Spokane
Country Club and we'll pick up the phone and we'll say, Hey,
there's a family in your area that wants OP thirty six.
This probably means there's other families in your area. Can
we give you a short demo of what OP thirty
six is and then they'll try to kind of move
them along and see if it's a good fit.
Speaker 3: And you've had success in doing it that way.
Speaker 2: Yes, and no more so more so when a coach
is already ready to go right right and we're running
into this in every industry, or we go to a
restaurant now hiring, we go to the local police department,
they're hiring, same thing. In the golf industry. We're short
on coaches, we're short on golf pros. So when we
call up Spokane Country Club and say, hey, would you
like to run the program? Sometimes these facilities go yes,
I would love to front the program. I just don't
have anybody to run right. So we've been in good
talks with the PGA of America to try to figure
out ways to bridge the gap hiring and getting more
people into the game as golf professionals. But certainly after COVID,
that has been a challenge to find really good golf coaches.
So when you do find an OUP thirty six program
that's running right now, we're pretty confident there's a really
good coach who's running it.
Speaker 4: Great.
Speaker 3: Great And what has the PGA of America. How have
they responded to this program?
Speaker 2: They are they've been very very supportive. We're PGA members,
myself and Matt, and they really Steve Tanner has been
a very supportive. He's the PGA Junior League director, and
he really sees the light on. Welcome Matt. Top thirty six.
PGA Junior League is step two that's really helped them
as well. So I would just say, for the most part,
on the whole, PJ of America has been very supportive
of OP thirty six and helping grow the game.
Speaker 4: Yeah, good job, good job.
Speaker 3: So I got to believe that when you were talking
about doing it at night, you know you have to
have classes around it.
Speaker 4: That you.
Speaker 3: Can't do it when other golfers are on the course.
You've got to pretty much dedicate that nine whole course
for operation thirty six Op thirty six so it doesn't
mess up with other players at the same time.
Speaker 4: Is that how that you could do it?
Speaker 2: A couple different ways to do that. One is if
you have enough players, Like if you have forty five players,
you can have the golf course run a shotgun for
nine holes because you're paying them green spees. You're not
asking for free golf. So the golf professional is paying
for the greens fees. If they have enough players, they
can block off all nine holes. Or I would say
in most cases they just do tea times, so you'll say, hey,
can I get sixty times? Can I get eight te times?
And then you would send them off in groups of
three or four, And like I was saying earlier, the
pace of play is really good, so it's not like
they are being pushed by folks. They are actually pushing
play a little bit, which is a great feeling to
have as a beginner. That you don't have somebody behind
you yelling, hey, go faster, you're actually the one that's
pushing play. But there is a science maybe it's an art,
I'm not sure which word to figuring out how to
get beginners on the golf course that doesn't interrupt play,
doesn't bother current players, and is also feels good for
the beginner as well.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure
going on.
Speaker 2: Oh, a ton of things, even down to like just
driving a cart for a beginner, Like it's just different
driving a golf cart. We've had to kind of create
courses for players on driving a golf cart, getting range balls,
What do you wear, what do you not wear? Like
it's it's not like picking up a basketball or a
basketball court. Like getting into golf is a little bit challenging.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the commitment, commitment, yeah kind of yeah, yep. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And what's the minimum and maximum size of a group
or a class.
Speaker 2: We recommend six to one. If there's two coaches, that
would be twelve students. If it's one at six. There
are some coaches that run out thirty six that only
want four in a class. There's some that would like
eight in a class. A lot of it's depending on
the coach and how comfortable they are, but at the
facility that we run here in North Carolina, we usually
go six. Six is a great number to have, especially
with the ladies. They have other people around them that
enjoy doing it. You can pair up for different games
you're playing, but for the weekly class, six is about right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes sense. Yep, this is so great.
Speaker 3: So you know, we've done multiple episodes over the past
on you know, people saying, Hey, I want to get
my kid into playing golf.
Speaker 4: What's the best way to get them started? So here's
your opportunity. Make your pitch. I would.
Speaker 2: I would revert a little bit to the research that
the majority of people that get into the game had
parents that got into the game. So if you're a
parent out there that doesn't play, I would join an
OP thirty six program to play because that would help
your kid play. That would be my first suggestion. Second
suggestion would be go on Amazon. We've got a book
called How to Create a Junior Golfer. I think it's
seven bucks eight bucks. It's like an hour read one
hundred pages, and we wrote it a couple of years
ago based on the question that you just asked me, like,
I'm a mom, I want to get my kid into
the game. What should I do? And eight or nine
chapters with stories of players from all around the country,
little girls and boys and adults that started in the
game of golf. And it's a I think that's that's
the easiest way to start, because then the mom feels
like she knows a little bit. I think the worst
scenario is she goes into the shop, the dad goes
into the shop. They don't know what to expect. So
if you read that book seven eight bucks, that'll get
you started on what is about to happen. And then
if you go to our website OP thirty six dot
golf find a program, you can find a program, hopefully
within your area that that runs OP thirty six and
if it doesn't, you can contact us and we'll reach
out to the different golf courses to see But as
long as somebody is not crazy rural like in the
middle of Montana or the middle of Idaho, there's usually
a golf course pretty close to where where folks are
that they could get started in OP thirty.
Speaker 4: Six And what's the name of the book again?
Speaker 2: How to create a junior golfer. Okay, yep, I think
I have.
Speaker 3: Oh that's okay, we'll find it and I'll definitely put
a link in the show notes to the Amazon link.
And you said OP thirty six dot Golf or is
it Operation thirty six dot Golf or is it both?
Speaker 2: Either want to work? Okay, yep, either want to work yep.
Speaker 3: Well, Ryan, this is a phenomenal program. I'm very impressed,
and clearly you've put a lot of thought behind it
and made it work, especially with the name. Congratulations on that.
I'm really glad that we were introduced to it. And
you know, I work with the first t on helping
kids fall in love with the game and learn the
life lessons.
Speaker 4: But this I can see. I want to get my.
Speaker 3: Granddaughter starting to play golf, and my grandson, I'm like, Okay,
this is a great way to do it, because you know,
they love I have a putting green in my backyard
and so when they come to visit, it's like.
Speaker 4: Grandpa, can we go play golf? It's like yes. Of course,
makes me cry every time they ask.
Speaker 3: But I think this is an amazing program and I'm
sorry I've not heard about it yet.
Speaker 4: But I sure, I'm glad it's come across my table.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for the supprise, thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it. We can ever help it any way,
Please reach out.
Speaker 3: Well A message to phill a Share above Eli, Cambridgeshire, UK,
who did our opening in today's episode. You know that
you and your golf buddies are also invited to join
our Golf Smarter adventure next spring. Right, it doesn't matter
where you listen to Golf Smarter or whether or not
you're a Golf Smarter ambassador. I want you to join
us for three great rounds on the legendary Robert Trent
Jones Trail in Alabama from March twenty sixth to the
thirtieth and twenty twenty five. This weekend golf outing is
for golfers of all skill levels and so that we
can all play together, we're keeping the size of our
group manageable to only three foursomes, but since there's always
some last minute changes, reserve your space now. Get all
the information pricing an itinerary at TMI goolf dot com
slash golf Smarter. That's TMI goolf dot com slash golf smarter.
Find all our episodes at golf smarterpodcast dot com, and
if you have any questions about our adventure, updates on
your game, or suggestions for a new episode, please write
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