Golf blog: life as a PGA Pro

The second blog from John Jackson, who gives as insight into life as a PGA Professional

John Jackson

Golf blog: life as a PGA Pro

Welcome to the second episode of my blog! A lot has happened since my last blog two weeks ago. I have just come back from the Belfry, where I spent five days learning on my year two residential.   For those of you who don't know, I am an Assistant PGA Professional in my second year of training to become a fully PGA qualified golf professional.   Each year as part of your training you are required to go to the Belfry for a residential where you cover a number of subjects, from golf coaching to learning about how to run a golf business.   The residential is generally a great week as you learn a lot and meet a lot of other assistants from all over the UK. However, this year was a bit different from last year in that we had to do a club fitting exam.   For the exam you need to build a club from scratch, before altering the loft and lie of the club. For a lot of assistants, they don't get the opportunity to practice this at their club as they don't have a loft and lie machine. For me, I went to see a local PGA professional Tom Gillespie who helped to show me what exactly was required in order to pass. Luckily, I had the exam at the start of the week, so I could relax for the rest of the week once I got it out the way!   Now that I have come back from the residential I have some revising to do for my final exams in April. It will probably be quite a stressful month as I also have a couple of competitions lined up, my first being next week at Weston Super Mare in the Titleist Assistants. It will be interesting to see how I do as I've not played a great deal of golf but hopefully once I get my final exams out the way I can really focus on playing again!   Lessons have also started to pick up as well, which is good news. My girlfriend bought me an iPad for my birthday a couple of weeks ago, which has helped massively as you get to show the player exactly what they are doing wrong.   Anyway that's enough for now, I will be back in a couple of weeks with an update on how things are going!

Golf blog: life as a PGA Pro archive

Blog 1

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