GFAA Best Practice: Establish Partnerships in Golf Fitness

Adam Betz, the 2020 Gateway PGA Section Player Development Award winner, is the PGA Owner at Family Golf and Learning Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

Adam Betz and Jon Benne on the importance of establishing partnerships in golf fitness:

When we opened Family Golf and Learning Center more than three years ago, we aimed to provide an elevated practice experience. With our vision and philosophy in place, we want to be the best training ground for golfers in the Midwest, and we strive to earn this claim by offering coaching in all aspects of the game. With a full team of golf instructors, we have decades of golf expertise to help guide our clients through the game improvement process. In today’s dynamic environment, however, it takes a more holistic approach to long-term development of one’s skills, and that means understanding the role of proper fitness in those efforts. Through our partnership with Dr. Michael Murphy of Performance Chiropractic, customers can get screened to determine how their body may be hindering the progress they seek in their game. In addition, our new fitness center, and partnership with Jon Benne of Elevated Performance, are changing the way golfers think about game improvement. The body plays a huge role in developing an effective, repeatable golf swing, and Jon is our golfers’ fitness solution. Getting golfers to go from the range to the gym starts with awareness and communication. The new fitness center opened in late 2020 amid the pandemic, but with proper COVID-19 protocols in place, we’re finally able to offer some of the programs and services we had in mind when we first considered this collaboration a couple of years ago. With 2,200 square feet, we have a full gym setup with turf to warm up, a large rack of dumbbells, squat rack, rowing machine, two pulley stations to focus on rotational work, a medicine ball wall and plenty of training aids. We’re not lacking any tools.

Adam Betz and Jon Benne on the business impact of establishing partnerships in golf fitness:

Collaboration is key to our early success. New golf student engagement starts with an initial evaluation that includes an extensive TPI screening, after which our fitness team shares a summary of information with their golf professional, including video and TrackMan analysis. We tout ourselves as the place that has every resource to help golfers reach their potential. Most of our fitness training is one-on-one, but we do have Yoga for Golfers classes every Thursday and Saturday, and a series of junior golf programs that teach kids how to control their bodies in the golf swing. That’s going to help them move more efficiently and increase their balance within their golf swing. With the people, programming and facilities that we’ve put in place, we can make that claim with confidence.

To email the author of this Best Practice directly, please email Adam@familygolfonline.com.