New Golf Monthly Top 25 Coaches List Revealed

After months of anticipation we have revealed the new Golf Monthly Top 25 Coaches list, with six new faces whose ideas we think will make our instruction content better than ever.

At Golf Monthly, we have always stressed the importance of lessons from a qualified professional.

Whilst information gleaned from the pages of our website can certainly help increase your knowledge base and even provide the killer tip to fix your slice, there is no substitute for the help of a great coach.

For this reason, in 2004, we established the first ever list of new Golf Monthly Top 25 Coaches to celebrate and recognise the achievements of those responsible for helping us play better. Since then, our group of coaches have provided the vast majority of advice you see printed within the pages of this website.

For 2016, we felt it was right to make some important changes to that list. We wanted to recognise some of the new coaching talent to have emerged as well as introducing new faces with fresh approaches and different experiences.

So at the end of 2015 we appealed to our readership for their nominations. The response was incredible, providing us with a broad spectrum of highly qualified and much-loved pros to choose from. Selecting just six for inclusion was always going to be hard.

See The Full List: Golf Monthly Top 25 Coaches

Selection process

How can you tell if one coach is better than another? Of course, judging the merits of prospective teachers is a largely subjective process but to help us make the right choices, we reverted to the process that served us so well in the very beginning.

That is, we turned to the questionnaire first designed for us by Dr Paul Schempp, the man responsible for the research lab at the University of Georgia and the brains behind the US versions of our Top Coaches list. His carefully devised, pointed questions would help us find the coaches that would move our instruction offering forward in the coming years.

From scores of applicants we whittled it down to the six new coaches you’ll see on our new Golf Monthly Top 25 Coaches list. The new coaches are Dougie Bell, Peter Dawson, Alistair Davies, Peter Finch, Rick Shiels & Ged Walters.

From a past Ryder Cup player to a couple of YouTube sensations, we feel these coaches are best placed to serve the golfing needs of our richly diverse audience, both in print and online. And whilst nothing can replace a real-life lesson, we hope that in the coming months and years, the advice you’ll find packed within this site will be even more useful than ever.

What Makes A Good Coach?

Knowledge

• Extensive knowledge of golf, students and golf instruction
• Avid and enthusiastic listener and learner

Experience

• Extensive teaching experience (minimum of 10 years)
• Extensive playing experience

Teaching

• Significant portion of lesson devoted to learning about the student
• Sets only one or two goals per lesson
• Analyses strengths and weaknesses, but only tells student what they do well and what they could do to improve
• Finds the single, most important thing to tell a student that will make the biggest difference to performance
• Uses few words, but can convey a single idea in many different ways
• An intuitive decision maker
• Has highly developed routines and rituals
• Closes the lesson with: student success, a review of important learning cues, recommendations for practice drills (they realise that students only really learn skills by practising them, not by listening to teachers)

Perspectives

• Teaches people, not golf
• Accepts responsibility for student learning (successes and failures)
• Measures teaching success through the learning of their students