THE COACHING TEAM

About the IJGA Bishops Gate Coaching Team

In just six short years, IJGA Bishops Gate is proud to have built the foremost golf coaching team in junior golf, with the results of our students evidencing the quality of instruction and development. Our analysis shows that we had twice the number of wins over our nearest rival and four times the number of wins over our third-place rival academy.

We see in the structure of the golf program two main elements, one obviously being the Coaching and Instruction of students, but also very importantly we recognize the importance of many areas of the golf program that require professional Management and Organization.

Girl practicing with a driver on cloudy autumn day

POD System

At IJGA we believe in developing autonomous and resourceful student athletes. We strive to create an environment that promotes individual purpose, builds skills and competencies, and helps students achieve their potential.

Based on research and experience we have developed a high performance golf training program to achieve that objective. The structure of the program is a POD system whereby students are organized in a POD with a highly experienced team of coaches who compliment one anothers strengths.

Within the POD system we are able to offer streaming so that students can work at their own individual level and in the areas that they need it most. We recognize that students need different challenges in their testing, performance games and technical coaching and the POD system allows us to provide that.

We have also introduced “core” and “autonomous” which allows for more developed and experienced players to have more input on their training schedule. The objective is to create a high level of motivation for students who are in the Core group to advance to Autonomous and for more advanced players to have more accountability in managing their own improvement.

The value of this model is in four distinct areas:

It provides a consistently high level of coaching to avoid any student being “left behind”
It allows for a more strategically planned tournament schedule for each individual and not for a golf group
It allows for a more individual training schedule because students have flexibility within the POD to work on all aspects of their game
It creates an interdependent coaching team that allows students to learn from more than just one coach and for the team to collaborate and share ideas.

Besides the clear advantages of the POD model, academy students also have access 7-days a week to the challenging training course at Bishops Gate where they spend time learning how to make decisions, building playing skills, and growing in emotional and strategic development. Creating a sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency through great coaching is what gives our students the best tools and preparation for their college careers and beyond.