Getting good at golf is hard. Figuring out how to make it fun and engaging for kids is even harder. As Operation 36 co-founders Matt Reagan and Ryan Dailey looked to solve this problem over 12 years ago, they saw how other sports — especially martial arts like Taekwondo and Karate — would progress through levels of mastery by testing students once they had acquired the necessary skills.
The result was creating a 10-division, variable distance gameplay format where students need to shoot 36 over nine holes in order to graduate up to the next level.
Reagan joins "The ModGolf Podcast" and host Colin Weston to discuss how the youth golf developmental program is growing the game from green to tee.
"The first five years of our existence we worked on building the program and trying to figure that out," Reagan says. "We'd sit down before class, plan for an hour and a half and then kids would show up. We'd run it and say "well that sucked, let's try it again!" and then we would experiment with different ideas. So we had this pretty cool environment where we were just testing group programming with kids and trying to figure out what works to make it fun, but also make sure they are getting better and turning into golfers. And then showing parents, who are the ones signing the kids up for the program, that this is working.”
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