Robert Dickman

Please indicate past awards won/recognitions:
PGA Section Teacher of the Year, GRAA Top 100 Growth of the Game Teaching Professional, Golf Digest Best in State

Other awards won:

Total number of individual lessons given per year:
Male: 600
Female: 200
Junior: 200

Total number of individual clinics given per year:
70

Please indicate any Growth of the Game initiatives your facility/academy has launched over the past year (please give specifics on such programs):
Our Academy is very much into Long Term Athletic Development, taking an adult or junior from functionally illiterate and helping them transform into lifelong golfers. There are several sports, according to the LTAD experts, that breed good golf skills through the motion, hand eye coordination, and kinematics that make golf an easy transition.. Those sports are Hockey, Tennis, and Baseball.
Our academy gas recently joined with a top hockey development program. We had 80 young hockey players last summer and introduced many of them to golf for the first time. We will seek to continue this program and develop it in the future in order to get these youngsters hooked on golf.
Our new facility Willow Hill Golf Couse also added a 160-yard dome and 9 outdoor turf full size soccer fields. This venue houses a 9-week summer all sports academy. We are in talks about making golf a part of the program through adding golf to the summer camps.
Through these programs we are taking young atheletes and introducing them to golf at a young age. Many would have never considered golf before this merger.
Our academy teaches as many as five separate ladies' clinics a week to skill levels from beginners to intermediate. It is a beach head of ladies instruction on the North Shore of Chicago. The clinics, taught by my daughter Kim Dickman, has lady golfers from virtually every ladies league on the North Shore.

Please share any programming you have made to keep your customers & students engaged:
The best program we have found to keep players engaged and motivated is our personal connection we have with them. Consistent mailings are a good way to show all of our products offerings. We have monthly mailers as well as special promotional pieces
A one-to-one call or text is what really keeps them connecting, however. Often, I will see a video or an article and text it to them. Writing down and remembering special events in their life is of great importance. A text like " how did you do at Bandon" a day after they get back because you had been training for that trip. Personal dinners with them and their spouses, calls on their birthdays etc. keep them personally connected better than any mass marketing.
Videos of their swings to them after a lesson with a prompt to work on the lesson for a prescribed time before scheduling another, show how interested you are in their game. It is not a transaction we are selling; it is a transformation!
Students do not care how much you know but will know how much you care. We make this a lifestyle.