By Vinnie Manginelli, PGA
Robbie Blackwell is the PGA of America Director of Instruction at Hoover Country Club in the Alabama-NW Florida PGA Section. A two-time GRAA Top 100 Growth of the Game Teaching Professional, Blackwell says he started playing golf by accident.
“I was a baseball player when I was 15 years old,” Blackwell explains, “but a friend of mine from our high school golf team invited me to play golf during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. I had played a little golf with my dad, so it wasn’t totally foreign to me, but I had never really played my own ball for an entire round before. At the end of the round, my friend told me that I should try out for the golf team. So with his encouragement, I did, thinking I could play both golf and baseball in the same season. Well, I made the golf team, but when I went to sign up for baseball, I was told I couldn’t play both sports simultaneously. I decided to play golf for the season, assess my performance and the experience afterwards and then decide whether to go back to baseball or not. Twenty-five years later, here I am still playing and now teaching golf! I would be lying if I didn’t have regrets early on about giving up a sport I loved so much. But golf has given me opportunities I am not sure baseball would have provided.”
Blackwell’s road to becoming a golf professional has been anything but orthodox. He planned to attend his local community college to play golf, but the golf program was cut the year he graduated from high school. As a result, he opted out of college and joined the workforce. Blackwell held jobs as an electrician’s helper, a debt collector and a loan officer after high school. On the brink of getting a promotion and effectively managing his own office, he had an epiphany.
“I just couldn’t see myself doing that job for the rest of my life,” he admits. “I decided to quit without knowing what I was going to do next and returned to playing golf after taking several years off. With hopes of playing more golf and maybe playing professionally, I decided to get a job at the bag drop at a local golf course. However, I found out quickly that working in the golf business doesn’t necessarily mean playing a lot of golf.”
Blackwell’s career path changed even more when he was promoted to an assistant professional role and was introduced to Ty Andersen, a PGA of America Golf Professional who was retired from the military and had a passion for teaching and coaching golfers, especially junior golfers. While Blackwell wanted to teach, he didn’t think he had the patience to teach juniors.
“The first junior I had the opportunity to teach turned out to be a blessing in disguise,” Blackwell recalls. “In his 30-minute lesson, he hit a small bucket of balls in about 10 minutes, hitting only one good shot. But that shot changed my mind about teaching junior golfers forever. The smile on his face could have lit up a dark room and I was forever hooked. I did not realize that teaching golf could bring so much joy to someone, much less myself!”
Today, most of Blackwell’s programming is geared around junior golf, as he understands that juniors are the future of the game and sees the business benefits of maintaining a successful junior golf program.
“In my 17 years of teaching, I have utilized many different formats for teaching and coaching,” he says. “But I believe the best program has been PGA Jr. League. For years, I would teach juniors and rely on them and their parents to get them some competitive reps. PGA Jr. League has given young golfers many opportunities to play competitive golf. I have used PGA Jr. League programming at two different facilities and have been successful at both. We had 48 juniors playing on our teams at Hoover Country Club in 2024, an increase of 35 golfers since my first season in 2021. This growth has helped me add value not only to myself but also to the assistant professionals on staff, as they are assisting me in running our programs.”
Blackwell uses some of the best golf coaching technology in his instruction, including a Trackman launch monitor for data, Swing Catalyst for video and several different training aids, the most popular being the very simple alignment stick!
In sharing his thoughts on trends and the future of golf coaching, Blackwell says AI will play a huge role in his efforts going forward.
“I am just old enough to not know a lot about it but young enough to see that it is going to impact how I do what I do in the very near future! And with the popularity of social media, golf content is going to remain a vital part of our game,” he concluded.
