Currently, Dave Kolquist is the Director of The First Tee of Eagle County in Edwards, Colorado.  Before accepting this position in 2006, Kolquist served as the Program Director for The First Tee of Denver for five years.  Due in large part to Kolquist’s vision, both of these USGA-supported programs implement a curriculum that is successful in both teaching the game of golf and using the sport as a vehicle to instill inherent values such as honesty, integrity and respect in its participants.  Kolquist has been kind enough to write a personal account of his thoughts and feelings on creating a program curriculum.  Enjoy!     

I was fortunate to have been selected as the junior golf director for the City of Denver in 2001.  One of the first responsibilities that my boss gave me was to expand the ethnic and gender diversity of the program.  The junior golf program had been a six week summer activity that had been well attended by, primarily, Caucasian boys.  It featured fairly traditional instructional sessions on putting, chipping, and full swing, followed by a nine hole tournament to end the summer.  Very few minority children attended even though the golf course was in the midst of an urban center and surrounded by neighborhoods of predominantly African American and Hispanic boys and girls. 

I told my boss that we needed to get involved with the schools.  He agreed.  I recruited excellent golf instructors, designed exciting instructional activities, organized and supervised play days and tournaments beyond what had existed in the past, gave prizes, and promoted the program to the schools in the neighborhoods surrounding our golf course as well as to the former participants in the program.  We had an excellent response from our former participants, but the target population in our surrounding neighborhoods stayed away in droves. My boss and I were dumbfounded and somewhat hurt.

In the fall of 2001, state mandated test scores in reading and math were published.  Students at schools in our neighborhoods were found to be performing poorly despite the very vigorous efforts of dedicated and talented teachers.  I volunteered some of my time at one of the schools in an effort to help and to get to know people in the community. The nine months I spent working with teachers and kids in this school crystallized my vision of what an effective tool golf can be in the education of kids.  As I got to know kids and their teachers a bond of trust was formed.  Kids told me that golf was slow and boring compared to sports like basketball.  Teachers told me that they were too understaffed to achieve the results desired by the school district and the state, and they welcomed my help as a volunteer.  As time went on I was accepted as a trusted member of the school and the community, and kids confided in me.

In discussing this with my boss, we adopted a concept that golf possessed unique qualities that would make it a useful tool in the academic, social, and physical education of kids; particularly those who had never been exposed to it before.  It was our belief that by introducing kids in our target group to golf we could help schools in their work with kids while teaching them a great game, and provide many ancillary opportunities through golf to those willing to make a commitment.

We designed our curriculum in response to feedback from boys and girls we worked with in our initial school.  We made the program multi-faceted and hands on.  We believe that we captured the essence of golf being more than another exercise in physical education.  Participants in our program can take part in and benefit from their experiences in golf regardless of their physical prowess for the game.  We are overwhelmed and gratified by the results we have achieved.   Not only did we drastically increase the diversity of our program, but our curriculum helped our participants improve in the standardized math and reading tests in which they had previously been deficient.  Kids we had been targeting became involved and recruited others. We are now in our seventh year of programming and have introduced our curriculum model to our second chapter, achieving similar successes in a vastly different environment.  When we left Denver in 2006 the program had grown from a six week summer instructional session to a year round program that included golf inspired activities for more than 1,300 boys and girls in 18 different school programs and a summer program. We took great pride in the fact that we had a high retention rate welcoming many new members each year.  The program has matured to the point that former participants now serve as mentor/instructors for new participants.  Several of these participants are now in college, having received scholarships due, in large part, to their successful experiences in our program. Our program also produced some outstanding golfers, most notably, the winner of the inaugural Wal-Mart First Tee Open at Pebble Beach in 2004.

Validation of the success of our curriculum model can be found in the fact that we have been able to produce similar results in a new program that we have introduced in Eagle County, Colorado, while the original model continues to flourish under new leadership.

It must be noted that while our curricular concept was developed prior to our involvement with The First Tee, the addition of their life skills materials has been invaluable.  While The First Tee certainly is not the only organization that promotes life skills development, it would be difficult to find a better presentation of life skills materials.  The addition of these materials has helped us to build curricula that reflects our mission of using golf as a tool to assist in the academic, social, and physical education of the kids we serve.

The fundamental features of our curriculum are:

• Introduction of golf to large groups of  kids through school physical education programs
• Hands on golf club making programs that work with schools to apply math, reading, and reasoning skills, taught in school, in addition to offering beginning golf instruction
• A rewards program called Read ‘N’ Swing in which participants get free golf instruction and play as a reward for successfully reading aloud to a mentor
• After school golf instruction at the school and at the golf course
• Family relationship building Parent-Junior golf programs
• Mentor training program that teaches interested participants to work with younger participants while preparing the mentors to apply for available college scholarships and/or jobs at our participating golf courses
• Summer golf and life skill instruction programs
• Summer competitive golf leagues featuring professional coaching, accompanied by continued emphasis on life skill development.