By Vinnie Manginelli, PGA
Being a NEW Golf Range Association of America (GRAA) Top 100 Growth of the Game Teaching Professional award winner can mean one of two things – you’re a young professional finding his or her way in the industry OR you simply haven’t applied.
Krista Dunton was the 2001 New Jersey PGA Section Teacher of the Year, an honor she also achieved in 2006 and 2022 in the Carolinas PGA Section. She was the 2002 LPGA National Teacher of the Year. She’s a Quarter Century PGA Member, has earned Top Instructor honors from GOLF Magazine and is a Golf Digest Top Teacher in the State of South Carolina. Needless to say, 2023 was the first time Dunton applied for our GRAA awards and thus this GRAA New Award Winner Profile piece is long overdue.
Born in Atherton, California, Krista Dunton started playing golf at the age of nine, when her mom, a former three-sport athlete at Michigan State, got her into the game. Dunton grew up playing at the Stanford University Golf Course, where her dad was a long-time pitching coach for the Stanford Cardinal baseball team. She was the only girl on the boy’s high school team but stopped playing golf for a brief time after high school. Feeling the passion for the game coming back, she started working on her skills again with Wally Goodwin, the long-time Stanford University golf coach who recruited Tiger Woods, Notah Begay and Casey Martin, among others.
Krista went on to play volleyball for a year at the University of Michigan and then played golf on scholarship during her junior and senior years. She played on the LPGA Futures Tour full-time for four years, spent a decade in the ‘90s and early 2000s teaching at Forsgate Country Club in Central New Jersey (under Billy Ziobro, PGA) and was an Assistant Golf Coach at Princeton University.
Today, Krista Dunton is the PGA/LPGA Director of Instruction at Berkeley Hall Club in Bluffton, South Carolina, where she’s been for 16 years, and has been a member of the Callaway Golf Master Staff program for over 25 years.
“Berkeley Hall Club is a dream job for me,” she says, “because of the physical layout of the practice facility, the two Fazio-designed golf courses and the outstanding, passionate membership. I’m also able to teach non-members, which drives my three-day golf schools, as well as private lessons and the many corporate events that I facilitate.”
She says the learning center is one of the best on the East Coast, where you can hit every shot imaginable. It’s a stellar selling point for the club, not to mention an asset to her many students in their instruction and practice between lessons.
Krista says she learned many of her teaching philosophies from Mike Adams, the 2016 PGA of America National Teacher of the Year, whom she met at a PGA Teaching and Coaching Summit in the mid-‘90s. Dunton would spend the next few winters in Florida observing Adams’ lessons and developing her own philosophies on the golf swing and communication with students. She learned how to run golf schools and better understand the methodologies of conducting effective group instruction.
She then adopted the concepts taught by Jim Hardy (2007 PGA of America National Teacher of the Year) and went out to Arizona to conduct “teaching the teacher” workshops, becoming the first golf professional in North America to obtain Level 3 in Hardy’s three-tiered certification program.
“These concepts were very ball flight-oriented and broke down the cause and effect of impact on the club,” Dunton explains. “It was more about learning by seeing the ball flight than utilizing the budding technology available at the time. What were the club and ball doing, and what was the player doing to manipulate both?”
Learning under Adams and Hardy shaped her future in teaching and mentoring the many students she’s touched over three decades of coaching. With 700 members at Berkeley Hall Club, there are many ambitious golfers with whom Dunton can share her expertise every day. After all, the pieces of the puzzle are all in place, and thankfully, Dunton is there to be the glue that keeps it all together.
