Jay Simpson, the founder of the First Swing program on connecting with kids, making golf more appealing for juniors and how he came to drive a Ferrari owned by a Saudi prince.
Jay Simpson | 38 | Brisbane / Founder of the First Swing program
I once had my bedroom window broken by an erratic tee shot from the sixth hole at Mt Warren Park Golf Club. Along with Dad being a member there, those are my earliest memories of golf.
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I was lucky in that Mum and Dad bought a house that backed onto the golf course at Mt Warren Park so I was exposed to golf at quite an early age. Every Saturday I’d look out the back and see people chasing a little white ball around.
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My sister and I raced BMX when we were kids and it got to a point where it was taking up a lot of time and money. My sister started dancing, I played a bit of baseball and rugby league but it wasn’t until I came home from school one day and asked Dad whether I could jump the fence and go for a chip on the golf course that I started getting into golf. In many ways that was the end of Dad’s golf career and the start of mine.
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As a kid I definitely saw golf as an older person’s sport and not something I’d be interested in. There weren’t too many juniors going past our house on a Saturday. It just wasn’t something I associated as a sport that I could play as a kid of seven, eight years of age.
I met some other juniors at the golf club and knowing that I wasn’t the only kid who played definitely fuelled my passion for the game. When I was in Year 8 I played the South-East Queensland District Golf Association C-Grade Championships at Mt Warren Park and I won by 20-something shots. I walked home across the golf course with my golf clubs and my trophy proud as punch. Mum and Dad couldn’t believe it. From that day I went from a 25-handicap to A Grade within a few weeks.
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I was a member at Mt Warren Park until I was 14 and there were a tonne of juniors. It was busy every Sunday. We’d have a junior competition and once a month there was a Monthly Medal for A, B and C Grade and that in many ways was the inspiration for First Swing.
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It was the fact that we had so many kids playing in those junior tournaments that really stuck with me. Over the past 20 years, being part of the golf industry, I’ve seen it go backwards more than it’s gone forward in terms of injecting new kids into the sport. When we’d play in a junior classic there’d be more than 120 kids from all over south-east Queensland. I’m now associated with Windaroo Lakes Golf Club and we are working hard to increase the number of juniors who are able to participate in our junior classic event. They started the event only last year and currently have approximately 40 kids and we hope to see that number continue to grow into the future.
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The seed of First Swing came from spending a few years in Canada and seeing how many juniors they had playing the game. I wanted to create a starting point for kids who had never played golf before, and then as they got older and developed some basic skills so they could move into a MyGolf program at a golf club.
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My best mate Brett Saunders is an Australian PGA professional living and working in Canada and has been something of a mentor for me. I had some junior programs running here in Australia using real clubs and real golf balls and I questioned my ability as a coach because after eight weeks kids weren’t continuing on with the program. I spoke to Brett, he reassured me that what I was doing was correct but encouraged me to look into this equipment called SNAG (Starting New At Golf). I fell in love with it straight away because I knew that was what we were missing here in Australia.
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The equipment is important because of the feedback it gives the kids. It has larger clubheads, it’s colourful, the balls are the size of tennis balls and soft and the large targets aren’t so far away. The big thing is that it’s not a sterile-looking steel club with a tiny white ball; it’s bright and colourful and fun.
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I bought my first kit from the States – it cost me an absolute packet – and used it with the Kookaburra Club that I’d established at Brookwater Golf Club in the last year of my traineeship. Not only did we retain those kids but we were also able to increase our numbers in the next program. Not long after, we approached some schools in the Springfield area about delivering the program. It was at this time that I had a conversation with my wife. I told her that I wanted to quit my job at Brookwater and that I had a business idea with a name and logo ready to go. We took the gamble, knew that the program worked within schools and that we could retain kids at golf clubs, so why not expand it?
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How we deliver the program is just as important. It’s not about putting your hands in a certain position and getting the club to operate on a certain path; it’s more about how to play a type of shot using swing thoughts and keywords. If we’re working on a full-swing concept, we’ll use a keyword such as ‘balance’ and tell them to get the club pointing at the sky. As soon as they do that they get the club all the way to the top and they understand that a full swing is that full rotation.
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Before I came to Windaroo Lakes two years ago, we ran First Swing at schools, community centres and council parks but not at golf clubs. I had some kids who were doing really well and needed them to graduate to a MyGolf junior program at a club and I knew Jared Love was running a good program at Mt Warren Park. I took two juniors, Madeline and Janey, across when they were seven or eight years old so they could get on a golf course and play with real equipment. Jared later moved from Mt Warren Park to Windaroo Lakes and asked whether I’d be interested in bringing First Swing there.
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At that time they only had four juniors at Windaroo Lakes and we have 109 at present. The pathway is that we start with Little Swingers and Fundamental Swingers then move into our Junior Swingers program, which is affiliated with MyGolf and supports the transition from the modified equipment into real golf clubs. The Junior Development program then takes them onto the golf course playing three, six and nine-hole competitions and each junior has a score they have to achieve before they move from the three-hole competitions up to six and so on.
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First Swing is a franchise business and we now have a program that starts with grassroots beginners all the way through to junior members. If a golf club doesn’t have a dedicated junior program in place, we now have something that we can offer for every level until they become junior members. Most clubs have juniors at some level but few have a dedicated program and really are unsure about how to get started. We need PGA professionals to run our program because we want that to be a point of difference. A lot of parents volunteer to coach their kids sporting teams but golf is in a unique position to offer professional athletes as coaches. I’m a big believer that we should promote that and take advantage of it as best we can.
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Of the 167 schools we currently visit, 24 of those are special-needs schools. There is great satisfaction going into a school that didn’t think golf would suit their students and seeing the kids have a go and have so much fun. The biggest hurdle was explaining to the teachers that their kids could participate because they were thinking about traditional golf with proper equipment. Once we got some video and imagery of the kids doing the program and having so much fun, every school in south-east Queensland with a special-needs department wanted us to come and deliver the program.
There is great satisfaction going into a school that didn’t think golf would suit their students and seeing the kids have a go and have so much fun.
We had one girl that I coached by the name of Darby. She was non-verbal but would go home and talk to her mum and dad about golf. She didn’t know any days of the week but she knew Tuesday because that was golf day. Initially she didn’t talk to me but then after building trust with her the past year, I turned up after Christmas and she had been working with a speech therapist. I was expecting her to just look at me and wave like normal but she actually said my name for the first time. Now she’s a chatterbox and it’s the best thing because I’ve seen that child flourish and bloom and, from what her mum and dad have told me, golf has helped her to do that.
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During my second stint in Canada, I did some teaching with a young kid whose family had connections to the royal family of Saudi Arabia. We got this random phone call in the shop one day from a Middle Eastern man saying he wanted to talk to someone about golf lessons for a family. They wanted a house, they wanted a car, they wanted a maid, they wanted a chef, they wanted everything. Typical Aussie, I thought it was a joke. We thought it was a radio station pranking us. I told Brett about this random phone call and after ringing a few other golf clubs in the area, I came around to thinking it was legit. We gave them a quote for all of the elaborate things they were asking for and got an e-mail back saying they would like to take us up on the offer and to make all the arrangements ahead of their arrival.
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On the way back to Australia, I spent nine weeks living in Dubai and working with Khalid. I had a driver, a maid and a cook. Every time I came down in the morning there was a table full of food. Most of the time I felt so bad because I just wanted to make myself a bowl of cereal. It looked like there were going to be 40 people turning up for breakfast every morning.
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The penthouse looked over the Palm Island and Atlantis hotels. They had their own carport downstairs that had a range of different cars that I could choose from a Ford Explorer to a massive Hummer to a Ferrari, motorbikes. Anything you wanted you could take for a spin. The young prince wanted me to take the Ferrari one day and I did it once. I took him to school in it and was crapping myself the entire time. The road rules over there are virtually non-existent and I didn’t want anyone to run into me in a $400,000 car.
I coached him at The Els Club in Dubai. He worked with Claude Harmon so I spent some time with Claude and Justin Parsons over there as well. I was more a playing partner than a coach when I was there. Brett was his coach when he was in Canada so I’d shoot some video and send it back to Brett and I would be there to make sure he was practising what he needed to practise and doing it properly.
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I’d gone back to Canada shortly after my father, Kerry, passed away. I’d started my traineeship at Gladstone Golf Club but one year in my father fell ill so I returned to Brisbane. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through as a person. He was my biggest supporter. I wish he were here to see what we’ve achieved.
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The program will have been running for eight years in July, so we’re starting to see that first intake of kids start to perform well at a junior level. Young Madeline has played from the age of seven and has just turned 13. She is one of my success stories, along with Aspen. Aspen was one of my first kids at Brookwater and is now 16, plays off 5 and is in the Queensland team being taught by Michael Jones at Sanctuary Cove.
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Those girls are two of my success stories from the early days, but what motivates me every day is just seeing kids trying something new and getting a kick out of it. The joy I see in the kids, that’s what gets me out of bed every day.
