ACADEMY REWARDS : The future of golf may be at David Leadbetter's school

Golf Digest, Oct, 2001 by Mike Stachura

Ground zero for the future of golf lies on a driving range wedged between an all-you-can-eat oyster bar and a trailer park in a section of Florida at its strip-mall finest. Come upon the place and you are likely to think you have made a wrong turn. But clamber up the faded wooden deck that hovers above the practice yard and you will be stunned.

You might see as many as 60 youngsters from age 12 to 18 making golf swings so rhythmically pure and effortlessly powerful that you have to shake your head to make sure you aren't at a location shoot for a Nike golf commercial. Blink again, and the scene remains: You are Salieri seeing the young Mozart for the first time. Only there isn't just one virtuoso below, there are 10, 20, maybe even 30, and the thing of it is, there's another whole squadron practicing at another location. There below, the kid hitting it 320 into the wind, he could be The Man. And if he isn't, the kid next to him might just be The Man, and next to him are a slew of kids who have an even better chance of being The Man or The Woman in 2005 or 2007 or 2010.

This is the scene every day on the range at the David Leadbetter Golf Academy in Bradenton, Fla., where the big sign out front says, "The Home of Junior Golf." The Leadbetter facility, which will be upgraded to a state-of-the-art range in the next six months, is one of three junior golf academies in the United States, a sort of pro tour boarding school where "students" take college-preparatory classes in the morning and hit balls in the afternoon. It is the most noteworthy of the three, but the Saddlebrook Preparatory School up the road in Wesley Chapel and the International Junior Golf Academy at Hilton Head Island, S.C., are every bit as intensive and nearly as talent-laden.

Scattered around as if at a never-ending summer camp are kids sporting the cool look of shorts, sunglasses and golf shirts with rolled-up sleeves, an image that seems an odd mixture of surf punk and Preppie Handbook. But these kids have real talent. One of the Leadbetter teachers estimates that of the 148 youngsters enrolled in their program, more than a third have handicaps of 4 or better. Not even boasting, he says, "Every day out here it's like a top AJGA [American Junior Golf Association] tournament field. Every day."

Paula Creamer is one of those talents. Just beginning ninth grade and her second year at DLGA-Junior, she and her family left home in Northern California to live the academy life.

"The competition is so great here," she says. "There's always somebody practicing at the other end of the range or on the putting green who's going to make you want to practice harder and play better."

Though administrators here pshaw when asked, it's not too outlandish to suggest that this is the future of golf--just as it might not have been too outlandish to suggest that 20 years ago the future of U.S. gymnastics was in a little private gym in Houston run by an obscure Romanian defector by the name of Bela Karolyi. It might not be long before the majority of the best young golfers on the planet come out of an environment like this (it's already happened in Sweden and Australia to an extent, as part of government-sponsored directives). As Ted Meekma, director of the IMG Academies, of which the Leadbetter Academy is a part, says, "I think we will touch a respectable number of professional golfers in the next decade."

At DLGA, as well as at Saddlebrook and IJGA in Hilton Head, academics are adjusted to make room for highly choreographed training, so the typical student here spends more time on golf than the average American high school student spends on homework. It is a lifestyle commitment, a commitment to a dream that starts with more than $40,000 annually in tuition, fees and expenses, including private counseling sessions with the on-site sport psychologist. If the next golf superstars are somewhere out on that range blasting drivers into the setting sun, were they simply discovered and massaged, or were they made like a robot boy in a Spielberg movie?

Jay Sylvan, age 18, is as thin as an exclamation point, and the golf club looks like a natural extension of his physique. Like a lot of kids at the Academy, he lists as he stands, the right shoulder lowered a little from the left, just as it should be in the perfect address position. He knows exactly the moment when he was convinced he had to come to Bradenton, even if it meant leaving the comforts of home.

"I was playing in an AJGA event, and it was raining and they canceled the round," he said. "I was inside the clubhouse drinking a Coke, and I looked out and saw this bunch of kids practicing on the range in the rain. It was all these kids from the Academy. I wanted to be that dedicated, too."

At their best, "Academy kids" seem so self-directed, so purposeful that it's almost embarrassing to be around them. Every day starts with a 7-ish breakfast; then it gets busy. There's a 7:30 bus ride to school (two private schools have specially developed academic programs for Academy kids, a third is on the site of the main campus), four hours of classes (no study halls, no shop class, nothing but college-preparatory-level curriculum), another bus ride back to campus, a quick lunch, another bus ride out to the range, four or more hours of golf, mental training with the psychologist, physical training, then back to the dorm for a supervised study hall, then more studying until 10 or 11 (unofficial lights out), with maybe a visit from the Domino's Pizza delivery guy somewhere in between.