Fashioned by frigid temperatures and the assurance of snow, a bleak winter afternoon in Manhattan is not the ideal setting for a round of golf. In the basement of Congregation Shaare Zedek, however, five eager boys delve right into the sport. At this near-century-old synagogue of the Upper West Side, it’s clear that there aren’t any rolling hills or manicured greens. Instead, a golf course is created from a combination of dynamic hoops, blocks laid out in zigzag patterns, and a whole lot of imagination—all conceived by Kate Tempesta’s Urban Golf Academy.
While New York City offers a host of athletic opportunities for very young children in the realms of soccer, baseball, tennis, and other sports, the Urban Golf Academy, founded in 2010, is the only program to apply creativity and imagination to teaching golf to children as young as 4. In breaking out of traditional approaches that focus singularly on technique development, UGA has a simple goal—to empower children. Kate Tempesta, its founder, explains, “It’s first and foremost [about] creating a really fun learning environment for children that will spark their learning of anything. We use golf as a vehicle to do that.”
To that end, play is always encouraged at UGA, where indoor and outdoor classes are divided into three age groups (4-6, 7-10, and 11 and up). Students can more or less abandon any presumptions that they may have had about golf. As Kate tells the boys in today’s class, “Anytime you’re bored, you need to use your imagination.”
The Urban Golf Academy has grown to include a variety of classes that are open to all students for enrollment, afterschool programs in private schools, and camp programs all around the city. Regardless of location, Kate employs her own creativity in conceiving out-of-the-box activities that practice the same techniques, like putting and chipping, that are the focus of traditional golf instruction.
“I might create a game, but I’ll have the objectives in my head,” Kate says. “I’m teaching them distance control or how to set up their feet, but this child thinks that they’re an astronaut launching a spaceship into orbit.” Or instead of asking kids to pitch or chip over a hazard, usually water or a sand bunker on a real course, instructors might ask students to steer clear of a pretend alligator—or they might actually have a blow-up reptile on their “course.” Other fun that can find its way into UGA’s 50-minute classes includes scavenger hunts, cartwheels, and fashion shows, all of which are much more appealing than strict orders like “slower swings.”
What these activities essentially do is turn the standard acronym of key technical concepts on its head. Instead of focusing on “grip, aim, stance, and posture” in what’s known as GASP, Kate and her staff use “games, attitude, success, and play” to help even the youngest golfers in the Early Birdies group better connect what their bodies can do with how to master the sport. Of course, for juniors (11 and up), the program also moves on to more advanced skilled development while nurturing all aspects of the students’ growth and development—physical, emotional, social, and cognitive.
Funnily enough, Kate once thought golf to be a dull and idle sport herself. It wasn’t until about ten years ago, when she finally decided to get her hands on the club and take a swing, that her entire perspective on the sport shifted. “It just clicked,” Kate says. “It went from boring to wow I love this—the physical side of it, the beauty of it, the rhythm, the balance, the perseverance, the thinking of it.”
After that revelatory experience, Kate started playing golf much more seriously. But the Urban Golf Academy only came to be when she melded her newfound passion with the instructional techniques she learned at her then day job, teaching creative movement at a private school in the Upper East Side. In these classes, she was using music, props, and imagination to help children explore movement—which was a perfect segue into Urban Golf Academy methods. “Golf to me is creative motion,” says Kate. “It’s creative not only for the actual person to be moving the club, but it’s creative for the teacher to be able to get the student to do what you’re asking them to do.”
These days, she still uses several props from the creative movement classes, like blocks, hula hoops, and a shadow screen, to fabricate the golf course. Children are asked to imagine themselves in the setting pictured on hanging screen—a fairway, a pond, a row of houses. Then, armed with SNAG golf equipment especially designed for beginners, they take to their games.
“What I realized very quickly through teaching children is that they don’t need fancy. They need a room with people who are going to teach to them and get on their level,” says Kate. In fact, she argues that you don’t need a PGA background to be a great golf teacher at all. “My experience as a childhood educator is far more valuable than my golf knowledge. For me, you have to be well-versed in kids.”
She proves that she’s as good as her word back at Congregation Shaare Zedek, where she expertly commands the attention of her students. When the boys start getting rowdy, Kate reminds them that golf is not one of the sports where you get to wrestle, appealing to their whimsical side. “Let me show you the magic elevator,” she cajoles, giving them the choice of going fast or going slow.
“How do you spell slow?” They sound out the word, struggling with the last consonant. Mini-English lesson over, Kate asks these little ones to “press the fast button,” and everyone crisscrosses their arms tightly across their chests as they wriggle their fingers, vigorously squat down, then idly stretch back up.
As Urban Golf Academy classes continue to grow in popularity, Kate hopes that her engaging games will help improve children’s interest in a sport that they may otherwise have overlooked. A big plus in working toward that goal is the fact that weather is of no consequence for UGA, which means she can introduce the joys of golf to students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Hamptons year-round. Of course, warmer weather means classes offered weekly in Central Park, but until then imaginations will have to do.
