Playing Sports Alongside Your Kids: Golf

Our family is a golf family. We all golf, and when our boys get older we will fill 1 ½ foursomes. Our garage is filled with all sizes of golf clubs, and we want to teach our kids early on how to play a sport that my husband and I love so much. We recently joined the Saratoga Golf & Polo Club so that our girls (ages 7 and 8) could join the SGPC Junior League golf team. We hired a well-known golf instructor last year at Saratoga National to help our girls swing better. And this year the Jr. League team at SGPC had a great coach who encouraged our girls even more to better their game. About halfway through the season, my husband and I decided to take our girls out for our first foursome nine holes together. So, how easy is it to play sports alongside your kids? Fun, but not so easy, I would say, after 9 holes. It started out well and we all hit off the first tee…the adults from the longer tee and the girls from the shorter one. But, halfway through the hole another golfer hit into us (blind hill) and we decided to let her play through. This threw off everyone’s concentration (as it sometimes does in golf) and we started to feel pressure to play faster (which everyone knows can make your good shots turn into bad ones quickly). So, for the next three holes we were off. We played off and the girls played off. Finally, on the fourth hole, when the course opened up a bit and we were able to settle in, and we stopped rushing our kids, all of our games came back and we shot some good holes. Sometimes as parents we don’t give our kids enough credit and we are first to criticize our kids or project on them some shortcomings that we have, either in life or in a sports game. One on one is much easier when playing with our kids, but two on two or eventually two on four is something that we very much look forward to out on the golf course.

​Visit us at www.besporthappy.com for more info on the 35 sports available for kids in Saratoga ages 3-13. Like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/besporthappy or join our Be Sport Happy Saratoga Equipment Exchange group on Facebook and exchange used sports equipment with other Saratoga families: www.facebook.com/groups/besporthappy. Also find us at www.healtheconcessions.com and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/healtheconcessions.​