Thursday, June 15, 2000
Outreach programs give kids chance to golf
By Carey Hoffman
Enquirer contributor
Tiger Woods has made it cool to be a golfer. And Markeith Larkin, 11, is living proof of it. His presence at Meadow Links and Golf Academy in Winton Woods this week is a victory unto itself.
Larkin, a sixth grader from Sands Montessori School who lives in the inner-city, is so turned on to golf that he was willing to leave behind his neighborhood friends Tuesday morning to make the lengthy trip to Meadow Links on a schoolbus.
Until this week, Larkin had never before swung a golf club.
He wanted to take up the game to learn some fundamentals so he could join a buddy of his on the golf course.
“I like golf — it's just another way of having fun,” he said.
Without programs like the “Summer In-Reach Academy” at Meadow Links, there would be no meaningful access to the game for kids like Markeith Larkin.
The Summer In-Reach Academy is the Hamilton County Park District's lead effort to recruit kids to the game from the city. Working with Cincinnati Public Schools, the program matches 45 city kids with 45 from the suburbs in an extensive golf experience that began this week and runs through July.
The Cincinnati Recreation Commission (CRC) will open doors to the game for a couple of hundred more kids this summer through the:
• Tony Yates Junior Golf Academy, the largest program in the area that targets minority and underpriveleged kids.
• And the Hook a Kid on Golf program, an introduction to golf sponsored by Doug Pelphrey's Kicks for Kids program and the National Alliance for Youth Sports.
But, when compared to the overall numbers, “we're just scratching the surface,” said Zachary Fink, who oversees CRC's youth golf efforts.
Nationally, America has 27 million golfers, but the latest figures estimate only 870,000 from that total are African Americans. That figure represents a 30 percent growth-spike since 1996, due to the Tiger Woods effect.
But there's a strong feeling locally that many more minority kids would be willing to give golf a shot if given the opportunity.
“We've got a real mandate from the USGA and the PGA to grow golf,” said Tom Kendrick, the director of golf for the Hamilton County Park District (HCPD).
That is why such a heavy emphasis has been placed on junior golf — and, in particular, minority juniors — in the past few summers.
Cincinnati Public Schools recruit the 45 city kids from recommendations made by school principals. Their suburban counterparts apply to the park district and are selected through an interview process.
The 90 kids who showed up at Meadow Links on Tuesday for the first day of the program were all between 9 and 13. About one-third of them were girls, a percentage the park district would like to see go higher. Through the program, they are provided with new starter club sets and bags they get to keep — a former Cincinnati orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Morten Bertram III, picks up the cost.
They will get six three-hour instructional days, during which they will work in groups of 15-20 with one of six members from Meadow Links' instructional staff. Then, on a series of seven Tuesdays and Thursdays during late June and July, the park district will open Meadow Links for play exclusively to In-Reach participants from this year and years past.
The program is in its 11th year.
The first day at Meadow Links was like almost any other first-day-of-summer-camp. The emphasis was on fun. The participants' first opportunities to swing at a ball involved knocking around miniature basketballs at makeshift targets set around Meadow Links' lesson tee. It was stress-free instruction and put smiles on a lot of faces.
Kyle Ratney, a 12-year-old from Avondale who came from Burton Elementary School, had a recommendation from a friend in the program last year.
“They said this was fun — they really liked it,” she said.
She looks forward to golfing more with her grandfather in Indiana.
Finding the fun in the game is the key for kids, said Bob Kuhlman, one of the In-Reach instructors and the winner of the Southern Ohio PGA section's Junior Golf Leader award in 1999.
“You have to be able to figure out what they want out of golf,” Kuhlman said. “Even though they all love Tiger Woods, they don't all want to be Tiger Woods.”
Tom Siler Jr., 23, is one of the program's success stories.
Without the program, he said, he likely would have never had a meaningful opportunity to play golf. But because of it, he helped lead Winton Woods High School's golf team to a 15-3 record his senior year and then went to Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., on a partial golf-scholarship.
Even though he's working fulltime at Keebler, he stil manages to find time to play a round of golf once a week, he said.
“I love golf,” he said. “I love the competition and the way the same golf course can play so differently on two different days. It was great for me to get this exposure to the game. I never would have had it without the (in-reach) program.”
Enquirer reporter John Erardi contributed to this story.
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