Colorado PGA launches ‘We Are Golf’

The campaign is meant to connect players with the teaching pros working to make their experience better

By Jim Bebbington

The Colorado PGA is launching a new campaign to introduce to the Colorado golfing community more of the professional teachers, course managers and operations professionals who are their members.

The PGA of America is the training and certification organization that ensures training, standards and quality for PGA teaching professionals, club operations professionals and club executive managers. It has more than 30,000 trained professionals who are employed at courses and clubs throughout the country and the world.

The Colorado PGA’s latest initiative is called ‘We Are Golf’ and is intended to help the average player understand the work that these PGA pros do behind the scenes to make the game enjoyable. While the separate PGA Tour gets most of the attention and TV time by entertaining millions of viewers through their excellent play, the 30,000 members of the PGA of America are the one’s building the game day-to-day.

“We are Golf is a way to let (Colorado players)  know about some of our pros, how golf has impacted their lives and in turn impacted the lives of all the people they have taught,” said Steven Bartkowski, executive director of the Colorado PGA.

Maggie Hartman

Maggie Hartman has been teaching young people to play golf as long as she can remember. She is only 30, but started teaching first while still in high school and working at CityPark Golf Course in Denver.

After teaching for several years, she went on to get her PGA certifications and learned along the way that the career held more for her than she expected.

“When I was younger, I didn’t realize how rewarding it would be for me,” she said. “Most part we do it because we love golf. I didn’t suspect how cool it would be making connections and helping other people do it.”

Hartman is a teaching professional with the Trent Wearner Academy program and is based at Westminster’s Walnut Creek and Legacy Ridge courses. She teaches junior players, beginners and adult beginners.

As the game has grown in popularity over the past few years, Hartman has been among the PGA teaching professionals who have faced nervous, inexperienced adult and young players. In addition to getting them to begin making their swings, she said the No. 1 goal is to get her new players to relax and remove judgment and criticism from their thinking.

“For most of my adult students, it’s just a matter of being more confident and (them wanting to) not embarrassing themselves.”

She has had students who suddenly had to face their first round of golf with their father-in-law, or work in a profession where there is a golf event coming up that they don’t want to be left out of. Many of her students begin with a group class, then move to one-on-one and some go to playing-with-a-pro classes.

For her young students, “my main space is getting kids where they can be independent on the golf course for the first time and maybe spark something for them,” she said.

Golf teaching and operations professionals famously work hours well beyond the normal 40 per week, and that can cause burnout in some. Hartman said she began her career like that but over time realized that if she wanted to sustain golf as a career, she needed to find the balance of time on the course and away from it.

“That’s something I’m proud of – I still go camping, to Water World,” she said. “If you’re not intentional about that balance, then you won’t have it.”

And as her career has gone on, she has also been surprised at the relationships she has maintained with many of her students. “The relationship side of it is big for me,” she said. “A lot of clients and students have become family. It’s not just transactional. I’m super happy in the space I’m in.”

Hartman is certified in Player Development by the PGA of America.

She has worked in many areas already seeking to introduce the game to new players, including the PGA H.O.P.E. (Helping Our Patriots Everywhere) program, MSU Denver women’s golf team, Denver East High men’s and women’s programs, the National Golf Foundation’s Welcome2Golf program, Colorado Golf Association’s outreach programs consisting of Special Olympics, Golf in Schools, Big Brothers Big Sisters and Children’s Hospital Adaptive Recreation for Childhood Health as well as PGA Junior League, The First Tee and a National Life Skills and Leadership Academy.

What’s in her future? As her teaching career progresses, she’s hoping to do more for women joining the game. She has seen first-hand the fear and baggage about the game that many women have when they show up for their first lesson, and is hoping to be able to help more women feel the same comfort, challenge and enjoyment in the game that so many men do.

“There’s a missing link with women and the intimidation factor of getting on the golf course,” she said. “I want to make more of an impact on that.”