From First Tee to 18th Green: Students Learn Golf, Life
A DMPS 5th grader volunteers to caddy for PGA professional Tom Pernice, Jr.
“This is the second year DMPS has partnered with First Tee,” said Carley Satterwhite, the PE Curriculum Coordinator for the district back in December when some oversized plastic golf equipment was delivered and tested at Howe Elementary.
The First Tee is a national youth development organization that teaches life skills and healthy habits through the game of golf.
“We have implemented the First Tee’s National Schools Program (NSP) in four of our elementary schools: Stowe, Studebaker, Cowles, and now Howe,” she added at the time, “DMPS students will be participating in the Principal Charity Classic’s Media Day next May 4th. That will be a fieldtrip to promote healthy choices through golf which can be a lifetime activity.”
At the time Media Day seemed a long way off. Monday it finally arrived.
The PCC is one of the leading stops on the Professional Golfers Association’s Champions Tour, a 25-event traveling show put on by the world’s finest senior touring pros. Each of the tournaments generates substantial donations to charities in the host communities but none does as much as the Des Moines stop. The 2015 edition will be played at Wakonda Club next month and Monday morning the defending champion, Tom Pernice Jr., was back at the scene of his dramatic triumph to meet with some unlikely playing partners – a lot of them!
Country clubs aren’t usually on the routes of DMPS school buses but several detoured off of Fleur Drive on Monday to deliver about 250 5th graders from the district’s cohort of four First Tee schools. They made for a more boisterous gallery than the genteel sport is known for but instruction in the finer points of golf spectating was just one of many topics covered by Pernice during an exhibition of shot-making that drew oohs, aahs and applause from his audience of novices.
A few of them took turns lugging his heavy bag of tricks and sticks from tee to green and some others took part in a chipping contest that indicated they’ve been practicing with the equipment that First Tee donated last December. All of them got souvenir golf balls and carried pedometers with them as they followed Pernice on his abbreviated round. Walking a full round of golf represents about a four mile hike and incorporates all of the major muscle groups.
Also joining in to play a couple of holes with Pernice was Roosevelt senior Aaron Wirt who led the Roughriders to a runner-up finish in the boys’ state golf meet last fall and has earned a golf scholarship to the University of Iowa. He makes for a good example of the nine core values (honesty, perseverance; those sorts of things) and nine healthy habits (safety and school are two examples) stressed by First Tee as the fundamentals of good lives whether a person ever becomes a golfer the caliber of Pernice and Wirt or not.
Besides the not so coincidental sum produced by adding the core values and healthy habits together, eighteen also happens to be the number of years required to get from preschool through a bachelor’s degree. Something for the 5th graders to think about this summer while they’re taking advantage of First Tee’s friendly, discounted greens fees at the municipal courses in Des Moines; Waveland, Blank and Grandview. Next fall they enter middle school. By high school they’ll have made the turn to the back nine.
But remember, it’s a game that lasts a lifetime.
