As the latest recipient of PGA Fellow status, golf coach Bobby King’s quest for self-improvement and next-level player development is continuing to gather pace and he’s determined to keep on climbing the ladder one rung at a time.
While driving ranges tend the be the natural habitat for most professional golf coaches, Roscrea native Bobby King takes a different approach and the Cistercian College – an early 20th century boarding school – in his hometown is his everyday office.
Now living in Shinrone, just the Offaly side of the Tipperary border, King spent nine years working as a professional at nearby Birr Golf Club before an opportunity arose to carve out his own niche and a joint venture with the school saw King take up the Director of Golf role.
Located within the grounds of Mount St. Joseph Abbey, the school once had a six-hole pitch-and-putt course, but though that was long gone, the ground was still there and ample indoor space allowed King to create a state-of-the-art studio.
“It’s very much a 50-50 venture,” King explains. “The school provided the room, and I provided the equipment. We put in an indoor putting green, golf studio, indoor bunker, indoor chipping and trackman, and it’s a joint investment from myself and the school. The studio has worked very well and for me to take on the Director of Golf role in the school made it easier because anything golf related goes through me.
“It’s been brilliant for the school and brilliant for me, so I am more than happy with how it is going so far.”
“Jonathan would be my mentor, and I got extra certifications through his Elite Performance Coaching. I completed level one and level two over the last 18 months, and that’s geared towards coaching high-level golfers and that’s where I want to branch out into.
“Jonathan is extremely knowledgeable and though he’s an Englishman and has coached the England National Team, he now resides in Australia and runs the elite performance academy over there and has a stable of Tour players, and that’s what I want to have.”
Although he doesn’t take credit for coming up with the slogan and can’t quite recall where he heard it first, there’s a mantra that King very much subscribes to when it comes to coaching players playing at the highest level.
“The best way to get to work with Tour players is to develop your own,” he says, “which is why I coach so many teenagers and juniors. This is a 10 to 15-year process, but I want to develop the next generation of Irish professionals. That’s the long-term goal.”
It’s one of the long-term goals, at least, but in the meantime, he intends to keep moving on up, literally and figuratively, through the designations of PGA Excel because he feels that the intrinsic value of the programme and the professional growth that accompanies each stage is priceless in the long term.
“You can’t simply qualify as a golf professional, start giving lessons and expect everybody to start coming to you,” he explains. “People won’t come to you unless they think that you provide value and I think now as a PGA Fellow Coach, that makes me stand out and be a little more desirable than some of the other coaches.
“If I want to keep improving, keep working with the players that I’m working with and additional players that may come to me, and develop them all to a higher standard, then I need to hold myself to a higher standard as well. Because if I’m working with players that I’m trying to make better, it wouldn’t be fair if I wasn’t trying to make myself better too.
“I know there are better versions of me in the future, as long as I keep learning the way I’m learning, keep developing, keep completing CPD courses, and keep meeting the likes of Jonathan Wallett - and maybe Pete Cowen someday - because they have endless amounts of knowledge. All I’m trying to do is tap into that and develop my own way of doing it, bring it back to my guys, and we all keep developing together. That continuous growth is what I think golf needs to be.”
The ultimate goal for King is to join the elite group who can boast Master Coach status, where he himself can take young and aspiring coaches under his wing, much in the same manner that Wallett has done with him.
No Irish coach has yet managed to ascend to the highest rank, and though he concedes that there are others ahead of him in the line, he’s determined to keep moving in that direction.
“The likes of Neil Manchip, Brendan McDaid and Shane O’Grady are all Fellow and Advanced Fellow, so I probably won’t be the first one, but someday I’d love to achieve Master status and I’d love for my name to be in the conversation when people are talking about the best coaches in Ireland.”
