Once a Button Hole Kid, always a Button Hole Kid.
Tyler Piekarski, PGA, has taken his career full circle right back to where it all began. At 4 years old, he took his first class at Button Hole Golf Course, receiving the coveted Button Hole Kid card that allows holders to hit balls or play 18 holes for $1 through their 18th birthday.
Button Hole, which celebrates a quarter century this year, is an “oasis of recreation” as so perfectly stated on its website. Golf really is the great equalizer here. As Piekarski explains it, Button Hole was created to provide a space for inner-city kids to learn not only the game of golf, but the character skills that come along with it. For the majority of Button Hole Kids, if it weren’t for the programming here, they would’ve never been exposed to the game.
“I was teaching a private lesson to a gentleman a few years ago––he was an intermediate player, shooting 80-90,” Piekarski says of others experiencing their own full circle, Button Hole-inspired moments. “He told me he went to an inner-city school and started playing golf at Button Hole. Now he owns his own business, and attributes so much of what he learned to his time here.”
Piekarski’s first love was hockey. He played at a relatively high level, enjoying minor pros for a few years, before looking back to golf and enrolling in the PGA Professional Golf Management Program. After a stop at Montaup Country Club, he returned to Button Hole and is now in his fourth year as PGA Head Golf Professional.
As a multi-sport athlete, and particularly a former hockey player, the American Development Model (ADM) made perfect sense to him––it was USA Hockey that successfully implemented ADM initially, after all. At Montaup he received his ADM Certification through PGA.Coach and started implementing it immediately in his junior programming.
Read more: Golf’s American Development Model
“It helped me pick up a lot of drills, and it’s a great platform that allows you to get creative and effective with your practices,” he said. “ADM is all about having fun, and fun has a different definition at each skill level. A five-year-old might want to throw bean bags, go through an obstacle course and maybe hit a few putts. For my advanced high schoolers, we might go out and play golf with only one club.”
In a recent TED Talk, Tom Farrey, founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, shared more about how we can build better systems to keep kids engaged in youth sports at the recreational level and why so many are quitting. The PGA of America regularly collaborates with the program and its signature initiative Project Play, which develops, applies and shares knowledge to build healthy children and communities through sports.
According to Farrey, we’ve divested in physical education and school-based sports. Club teams and elite tournaments designed to aggregate talent rule supreme, as do child prodigies. “If we start our child early and load them hours of practice, maybe he or she could be the next Tiger Woods.”
“It’s one of the biggest challenges we have as coaches,” Piekarski says. “We have a 9- or 10-year-old whose dad is taking him out of baseball because he thinks it’s messing up the child’s swing. He or she should be playing as many sports as possible, and having as much fun as possible.”
“Both golf and hockey allowed me to develop athletically,” he explains. “It’s more athletic than it is mechanical, my swing. If we can get kids to develop athletically through multiple sports, it’s great. Right now, I have two of the better female golfers in the state, who are also some of the better volleyball players in the state. I tell them don’t stop playing volleyball, either, because it’s helping you grow as an athlete.”
“The fundamental problem is that we’ve created an up or out model,” Farrey says. “Unless you pay more and get more serious, there is no place for you.”
That’s why, he says, “We need to bring back in-town recreation leagues. Locally, at low cost and at low lift––you might be able to ride your bike to the game. We need student-led clubs, intramurals… more options for more kids who are often pushed aside.”
That’s precisely what Button Hole, Piekarski and his colleagues are doing in Providence, Rhode Island, for the more than 25,000 children––roughly half of whom pay nothing to participate––who flock to a facility that used to be nothing but a gravel pit.
“It’s a really neat mission, and the cool thing is that it doesn’t just cover the game of golf,” Piekarski said. “It spans the community as a whole.”
