Coaching the Future

Inside Team Colorado’s mission to develop elite junior golfers through pressure, preparation, and high-level comparison

For several years Kelli McKandless has been coaching and teaching adults and children golf at Denver-area courses. She also created a junior golf tournament season – The Summit Junior Golf Tour – which this year will host 13 tournaments to give teens in Colorado a chance to compete at top area courses.

So it was natural that as the Colorado Golf Association formed its youth-development program Team Colorado McKandless wanted to be involved. She called the CGA last August to say she would be willing to help in any way she could, and within a few weeks was interviewing to be the new head coach.

This season McKandless is the head coach for the 16-person Team Colorado, which is made up of eight top boy and girl players in the state. Team Colorado is run by the CGA and is part of a national network of teams organized by the USGA in an attempt to better prepare the best U.S. players to compete at a high level. This is the USGA’s response to programs in other countries that underwrite youth golf for their top players, efforts which are credited for the high number of players from around the world topping PGA and LPGA tour leaderboards in recent years.

“I don’t know how the kids feel about this but my goal is to grow their development and help them meet their goals,” McKandless said. “Each week every time I see them, my job is to introduce them to things that they didn’t know they had to do.”

She is not a swing coach – most of the players already have one who they work with. She also is not just a chaperone on trips – although that is part of the job.

But at least once a month through the year McKandless brings the players together to either shepherd them to high-level junior tournaments, or runs clinics in which she tries to give the players physical and mental challenges that help them play better under pressure. And these are not just just-happy-to-be-here drills. “(These are) ones that create the atmosphere for failure and create the atmosphere for success,” McKandless said.

In one, players have to hit a drive well, jog to a nearby practice green, chip within a few feet, two-putt a lag putt from 40 feet, then sink a sliding six to eight foot putt. If they miss any of the four, they have to jog back to the range and start over.

In another drill she will give players a 10-foot putt and they have to hit nine either in or past the hole on the pro-side. If any putt comes up short or slips below the hole – meaning they under read the break – they have to start over. If players get frustrated, McKandless said she takes that as a chance to talk with them about what they’re feeling, how they’re reacting, and to help them re-focus.

Nearly every member of the team is hoping to move on after high school to play in college. Pressure shots are part of that life, and McKandless said this experience should make them accustomed to playing with a little heat on.

Over the winter Team Colorado spent three days in Tucson playing Tucson National and working together. They had a two-day session in April, playing at Raindance National Golf Course the first day and Cherry Creek Country Club on day two.

In the summer McKandless will organize practice rounds for the players on courses that are hosting big junior events – Walnut Creek Golf Course and Green Valley Ranch Golf Course. They have out-of-state trips planned partly to give the players experience similar to the travel schedules they will have if they play college golf.

“These are people wanting to be the best; they’re already the best at a state level,” she said. Players on the team are ages 13 to 18 and are selected through interviews and junior rankings and points lists from the Colorado PGA and American Junior Golf Association.

This year’s team includes three of the four winners of 2025 girls state championships – Ella Scott of Castle Rock, Landry Frost of Colorado Springs and Sophia lee of Columbine Valley – as well as top boys players Miles Kuhl and Ash Edwards of Boulder, Nicholas Brooks of Parker and Brayden Forte of Aurora.

By the end of this summer all but six of the players will age-off the team, and a new selection will take place in the fall for 2027 members. So for the rest of this summer McKandless sees her role as supporting, challenging and – she hopes – helping improve some of Colorado’s top young talent.

“I love group intense, pressure filled practice! think that makes them feel a little bit more comfortable in competition,” she said. “I was told early on my career to make things harder than it actually is during the performance so that you can understand how your body reacts. And now it’s really hard to create the pressure of a tournament. You just have to keep doing it and keep learning, growing, journaling, figuring out what you did right, figuring out what you did wrong, and then coming up with a better game plan. I think that if we can at least put some pressure on them during practice, at least down the stretch, they might be able to go back and resource that in their brain and understand that they’ve done something like this before and they can perform at a high level.”