BY MATTHEW RUDY
Ben Pellicani, PGA,PGA of America Teaching Professional,Westhaven Golf Club,Franklin, Tennessee
Ben Pellicani readily admits that he has never been a great marketer, generally considered a key skill for an independent golf instructor interested in building a business in a crowded market like the Nashville area. But the two-time Tennessee PGA Section Teacher & Coach of the Year – and former mechanical engineering major at Lipscomb University – is using technology to streamline what had been the most painful and labor-intensive part of his job.
After spending nine hours a day in his lesson bay at Westhaven Golf Club in Franklin, Tennessee, working with students ranging from elite juniors to tour professionals, Pellicani no longer grinds over emails and other marketing communications. He’s using AI tools as a kind of virtual assistant to give him more time to do what he really loves: building relationships.
Take Pellicani’s busy summer season. In previous years, texts and emails from students tended to back up, robbing Pellicani of the chance to have the back-and-forth conversations that lead to productive practice sessions. Using V1 Sports’ AI assistant Victor, he now has always-on eyes on student communications. Victor sends check-ins and fields responses, and Pellicani is prompted to respond. What students receive is a timely, personal reply from their instructor – one that might have gone unsent on a busy lesson day.
Another challenge Pellicani has confronted using AI is content creation. The Nashville area’s instruction market has added 15 new teaching facilities in five years, and Pellicani had expanded into online coaching through V1’s platform, putting him in competition with instructors nationally. Getting to those students requires content: social posts, newsletters, practice frameworks. In other words, the kind of writing that had always felt foreign. ChatGPT became his way forward. He loads it with his actual teaching philosophy first: his faith-based approach to the game, influences like Donald Miller and Simon Sinek, the goal of helping players find joy, comfort and peace on the golf course. The AI learns his voice as he corrects it, which means the practice plans he generates now require less revision than the ones he made six months ago.
That process gave him enough confidence to write “The Standard,” an accountability journal for students about the mental side of the game. It took 12 hours of back-and-forth with ChatGPT to get it right. Without the tool, he says, there was no chance it gets written at all.
None of this touches the work Pellicani cares about most. He teaches a man in his mid-70s every Saturday morning – a student whose health has been failing, who may not have many rounds left in him. He comes anyway, because it’s his way of continuing to be a part of the game he loves. How important is it? The man’s wife has never met Pellicani, but she made knitted baby blankets for his kids.
“I can be more fully present with students like him,” Pellicani says, “because a lot of other things are being taken off my plate.”
For coaches who want to start, Pellicani’s suggestion is to ask an AI tool to conduct an interview before you ask it to write anything. Not “write me a practice plan” but “ask me 20 questions about how I teach the short game so you can understand how I think.” Feed it your actual philosophy, your methods, your voice, says Pellicani, and make sure to probe and push back on things that don’t sound right. Coaches who skip that step get content that sounds like what it is: something that could have been generically created by anyone else.
“We’re all so immersed in technology now, but I always think back to something (well-known PGA of America Instructor) Martin Hall once told me,” says Pellicani. “Martin said: ‘People come to you for information to play better, but they’re really coming for the interaction. This is entertainment! They want to know that you care.’”
Concludes Pellicani: “Now you can have reminders and tools that help you deliver that better. You’re creating even more intentionality and authenticity.”
