Youth on Course, Pebble Beach teaming up to make youth golf cheaper

Youth On Course, a Pebble Beach-based charity organization, is making kids’ golf significantly less expensive, and the movement is growing nationwide.

Everybody is looking for ways to get more golfers on more courses and to get youngsters to play golf. Youth on Course, headquartered in Pebble Beach at Poppy Hills GC, is actually doing something about it.

They now have 30,000 members, aged 6-18, who have played 620,000 rounds of golf subsidized by Youth on Course. The organization is still growing and looking for courses that want to participate. The hope is that, later on, the young golfers will translate into adult golfers.

“We are all about giving access,” said the Youth on Course’s marketing manager Kaitlyn Petrando.

As Petrando explained, youngsters who join the organization are guided to participating courses that charge each young golfer just $5 per round. Youth on Course subsidizes the rest, up to $25. The organization relies on donations from golfers, clubs, businesses and others who want to participate in growing the game. For example, the Pebble Beach Foundation sponsors two Youth on Course college scholarships every year and makes a donation for their fund-raising on-line auction.

Participating courses include Spanish Bay, which is part of the Pebble Beach Company, and Poppy Hills, which is owned by the Northern California Golf Association. If you know anything about either of those courses, you know that the subsidy does not pay anything close to the full cost of a round at either of them. The courses are also making an effort to get young golfers started in the sport, taking a fraction of the rack rate of a tee time to provide them with an opportunity to play. Poppy Hills charges $80-110 and Spanish Bay is $290 if you are a resort guest, more if you are not.

Started in 2006 as a charity of the Northern California Golf Association, Youth on Course is now its own 503c charity.

Where is Youth on Course operating?

While the majority of current Youth on Course courses today are in California, mostly from Monterey to Santa Rosa, they have quietly spread up the west coast to Washington and Oregon. Some of the courses in the program today include:

California:

Shoreline Links – Mountain View, CA
San Ramon GC – San Ramon, CA
Spring Hills – Watsonville, CA
Sunken Gardens – Sunnyvale, CA

Oregon:

Laurelwood – Eugene, OR
Oak Hills – Sutherlin, OR
Watson Ranch – Coos Bay, OR
Redtail – Beaverton, OR
Oregon Golf Association Course – Woodburn, OR

Washington:

Bellevue GC – Bellevue, WA
Jefferson Park – Seattle, WA (Fred Couples’s course growing up)
Lake Wilderness – Maple Valley, WA
Gold Mountain – Bremerton, WA
Capitol City – Olympia, WA
Highlands – Tacoma, WA

And those are just a few.

However, courses are also participating in Spokane, Boise, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe, Phoenix and Tucson, Albuquerque, and El Paso.

22 different states are now participating, according to Petrando. In the Midwest, the program is gaining steam with courses in Chicago and Minneapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, Lexington, Dayton, Cincinnati, Lansing, Ann Arbor and Detroit areas.

The farthest east is the I-95 corridor of Georgia with Jekyl Island Golf Club and The Club at Savannah Harbor joining. Like the Pebble Beach area courses, these two coastal properties are charging Youth on Course far less than rack rate to encourage play by 6-18-year-olds. Courses in Atlanta and Macon joined as well.

There are currently 600 courses in the program. At the recent PGA Merchandise Show, several courses signed up, according to Petrando, and that may add to the number of states participating. Recently, the Carolinas Golf Association joined the effort, but courses are not listed on the Youth on Course map as yet.

How to join Youth on Course

Youngsters who want to participate sign up, and they receive a special Youth on Course card to present to the course. Some First Tee locations automatically sign up their golfers for Youth on Course.

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Right now, there are no courses participating in Florida, which has more golf courses than any other state, none in Texas or Oklahoma, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, or any of the New England states. There are none in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, the Dakotas or Nebraska. The most likely reason? Exposure. Really, if you own a course, why wouldn’t you participate?

In addition to providing reasonably priced golf to youngsters aged 6-18, Youth on Course also has paid intern programs in golf settings, a caddie academy, and college scholarship programs. To date, 109 scholarships have been awarded from 2015, when the program started, through 2017. While a few of the scholarship recipients will play golf in college, most will not. They are pursuing careers from mathematics and aerospace to nursing to theater arts.

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Since the beginning of the program, Youth on Course has hired 115 interns and 362 caddies. They’ve also provided over 600,000 rounds of golf. If they doubled that, or the number of courses, it could equal 1.2 million rounds in the next three years. Granted, several of those rounds would be far lower than rack rate. However, Youth on Course understands that introducing people to golf at an early age can only help grow the game as the years progress.

Signing up to be a course up for the program, which uses unclaimed tee times, is easy. Visit https://youthoncourse.org/courses/course-interest-form/

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