Erica Feuerhelm

Please indicate past awards won/recognitions:
Other (Indicate specific awards below in 3-a)

Other awards won:
2025 NGCOA Growth of the Game Award (National Golf Course Owners Association) – Facility Award

Total number of individual lessons given per year:
Male: <20
Female: 300
Junior: 600

Total number of individual clinics given per year:
Our facility does around 50. Our Juniors are just shy of 30, and ladies just over 10. We also have a few adult free clinics and winter program

Please indicate any Growth of the Game initiatives your facility/academy has launched over the past year (please give specifics on such programs):
As the summer signups began, I noticed we had a larger number of people interested in joining our PGA Junior League than we had spots. I decided to add two 9U PGA Junior League teams for our younger kids to keep them engaged with the game from the spring program. We had 18 kids from this age bracket. We previously had two 17U and two 13U teams. We also had more interest from the older groups and I added an alternate team that competed at home a few evenings in the summer after the last tee time went off (we are a busy 50,000 round facility). Our 9U teams we utilized summer intern help and parents to run the actual matches themselves (6 matches) which consisted of 3-4 holes depending on their pace of play. For all of our PGA Junior League teams we added additional practices that didn't exist in previous years. We went from practices every other week in 2024 to practices every Saturday as well as every Wednesday for the older two groups. These practices ran for 6 weeks this summer. We made a big push to send a team to Nationals and while we weren't able to make it that far we did advance to the semi-finals at Regionals for one of our 17U teams.

We also added a program for our competitive juniors this fall that's more like a travel series. Juniors only pay for their round and any food or travel costs. This is more about our top instructors spending more time with our top players on the course in a fun setting. We are also including some history, course strategy, and mindset education. Our biggest focus though is simply fun and fellowship. We want our juniors to come together and build a fun community together. My Director of Instruction and I are doing this on our off-days as well.

One of my favorite things we added was getting 5 juniors on our staff to help with junior programming instruction. We love the mentoring aspect of this and it gets us the extra hands we need to provide a much better instructor:student ratio while also being able to financially benefit our best coaches as well. We have included some volunteer juniors in the summer months as a part of requirements they have for certain classes or programs at their high schools.

I added 5 winter classes this year (heading into 2026) that are also filling up and will utilize our new 2-bay Learning Center that was added in February. These classes will have between 8 and 12 kids each. The design of these is to train indoors with full simulator capabilities as well as complete putting, chipping, and fitness related activities depending on the age and stage of the group.

While I wasn't the Director of Ladies Programs, I was a key assistant in the continued growth of our on course ladies classes in the spring as well as our Fore The Ladies Crash Course Clinics. We added on course classes with a group called Walk 9 With Us where they can come and play 9 with some education alongside it. On top of that we added some other on course classes this spring where we didn't play holes, but worked on situational items for two hours. Our goal was to educate our beginner to intermediate ladies to grow their understanding and knowledge of how to "play" the game of golf. I was also instrumental in leading one of our other instructors, Elijah Tackett, to add an Operation 36 class in the fall of this year and get his beginning ladies on the course in a way where they can have success and have a good time given how overwhelming the game can be. The ladies became a part of the Operation 36 app as well as added a match at 25 and 50 yards during the program.

On November 16th we will host our first Family Cup Event as well! We are currently slated to have 9 families participate in our first ever "parent/child" event that further engages our PGA Junior League families for the summer and gives them one more fun event to play in before the weather gets iffy to play in during the winter.

Lastly, last year I worked with our owner to add two sets of "junior tees" that we are calling "Young at Golf" tees. We utilized the rating systems and plates provided by US Kids golf to outfit all 18 holes with these tees. That was completed at the end of October in 2024 just in time for our Junior Club Championship.

Please share any programming you have made to keep your customers & students engaged:
We have continually offered junior programs since I began as an intern in the spring and summer of 2020. I interned there for several years while I was in college until I became the Junior Program Director when I graduated in 2023. Once I came on we set an 8 week program in the spring and fall, and pushed to grow our summer programs (Nike Summer Camps and PGA Junior League) each year. We held steady from April 2024 through May 2025 for our 8 week programs (58, 65, 64 kids respectively by season) until this fall when we expanded to 99 kids for our 8 week program. In addition our Nike Summer Camps went from 172 to 205 kids, and as mentioned our PGA Junior League teams I expanded to 81 kids from 48 in 2024. We actively use the Operation 36 curriculum with all of these programs including adding video to the platform for parents to go back and watch. One of the highlights that I believe has helped this year to get them more engaged is to give out points for those that actively engage with the learning materials in the Op36 app. They redeem these points at the end of each season for fun prizes!

In our Nike Camps our focus is to present golf as fun and engaging and for those that are in the older brackets we are able to get them on the course 1-2 days during the week and run the Op36 scoring system as well. Each of our Nike camps has between 18 and 30 juniors each week ranging in age from 7 to 17 years old. With PGA Junior League, we put a heavier focus this year on preparing them to handle pressure. So for each age bracket (9U, 13U and 17U) we had skill appropriate games that would challenge them. For our younger groups we also made sure to work on fundamentals that were lacking and contributed to struggles with those skills.

I have also individually gone into schools for the last 3 years to teach SNAG golf to more than a dozen schools and over 4,000 kids. This was all done off the clock as I volunteered my time to do so. I started these with our Director of Instruction in 2023, and the last two years have led these by myself or by inviting one of our two other new teachers (Zach Crane and Braden Nunez) to teach alongside me in the schools. This school season (2025/26) we have invited a few schools that we have already taught at to bring their kids to our course for a field trip to teach them golf at our facility. Again, to volunteer our time with. This will amount to between 200-400 kids this season coming to our course and allow us to go to some additional new schools this winter!

Lastly, a few years ago I started a Junior Club Championship. This is our third season doing it and we will have over 75 kids participate at the end of this month (October 26th date). Our first two years we had 45 and 50 kids so this will be a nice expansion for us! We have something for every age bracket including a "Snag golf" bracket for kids aged 4-7. We also have 9 hole and 18 hole divisions across various skills so that every kid can compete at an appropriate skill and interest level. Lastly, one of my favorite things with this event is that I treat it like a "fall festival" by having lots of fun golf related games and activities for the entire family to participate in where both competitions and their siblings can have fun with golf before or after the completion of their round. This event also requires us to have a large number of volunteers and engages all of our students as we regularly have around 20 volunteers. In addition to all of this, we were able to secure more than $4,500 in donations this year to bring the cost of this event down and pay financially for a few kids who couldn't join some of our programs due to personal circumstances. Finally, for this event we have a major local food sponsor covering food for the event (Mojo's Tacos) and we were able to book out the entire course for the afternoon for the first time. This is my favorite event of the year as it pulls all of our players and families together!

For our Ladies we have regular spring, summer and fall programs. Some are internal where we don't partner with anyone, and some utilize the Fore the Ladies and Walk 9 With Us Organizations. Again, our expansion here was about 30% for our ladies, mostly due to the addition of internal programs on the course as well as for the first time patterning with Walk 9 With Us. With Fore The Ladies we have 3 different crash clinics (single day events) to introduce ladies to the game. And for those that are more interested but still beginners, we have 3 separate 4 week clinic series that we run with them. As a reminder, I don't run these programs directly myself, but am involved as an associate instructor in a few of them throughout the year. My energy is focused on teaching juniors through clinics and classes and doing private lessons for ladies.

Lastly, We offer free clinics to River Club Members (preferred play rate / range membership) at the course. These have around 8 people in each and we usually have two instructors at each. While not a main focus in my teaching, I do assist in these throughout the year as my schedule permits. The team (6 instructors) shares these throughout the year.