Camille Enright, PGA,PGA of America Assistant Professional,Boot Ranch,Fredericksburg, Texas
Camille Enright spent her collegiate playing career at the University of Denver logging up to 30 hours of practice a week, FaceTiming her swing coach and grinding on drills, all while carrying a part-time job and a full class load. She was a range rat by temperament and conviction, and she was sure that more time hitting balls was the same thing as getting better.
It turns out she wasn’t wrong about the hours. She was wrong about what the hours were for.
Now, Enright is PGA of America Assistant Professional at Boot Ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas, and was recently recognized as the 2025 Southern Texas PGA Assistant Golf Professional of the Year and the Section’s 2025 Women’s Player of the Year.
On one of her given “quiet days” on a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, she might play nine holes. That’s as much practice as she tends to get. In between, she teaches, manages pace of play, works in the golf shop, and handles the club’s merchandising. That’s a lot of hats, as she says, but in that shuffle, she has become a better player than she ever was when practice was her whole job.
“I think I’m at the point in my career where I can lean on the experience that’s been built up,” she says. “I don’t have to practice the way I did – or worry the way I did – when I was a younger professional or an amateur.”
That shift has become the foundation of how she teaches. Enright’s member clientele doesn’t generally have time for elaborate practice. They may hit a bucket of balls on Saturday morning and practice a half hour on a weekday if something opens up.
Enright meets them there.
Her prescription is direct: Stop hitting so many balls – not because practice is a waste of time, but because most of what passes for practice isn’t really practice.
“I will hit people over the head with how theyshould be using practice time because it is so precious and limited,” Enright explains. Thirty purposeful repetitions, she says, will do more than hours of mindless range work.
Enright’s students start every session by building success – like a few chips that go where they’re supposed to. She has ingrained a mindful reaction to the work by asking students to pause after each shot and evaluate it without negative self-talk while immediately pulling another ball over to hit. Instead, they rehearse the correction and then go through a full routine before hitting again.
“Everything is building up your subconscious mind,” she says. “You’re constantly working on improvement vs. worrying about what you did wrong.”
The same logic applies to her own game. The obsessive college years in Colorado are a foundation she can still draw from, but the anxiety that came with them – the need to perform, to validate the hours – is gone. Enright says she’ll sometimes go out with a fellow Boot Ranch PGA of America Professional or a member late in the afternoon, play whatever holes she can get to, and let the accumulated years do their work.
There’s no need to be perfect to make a score.
“I don’t need to go out and hit 200 balls and neither do you,” she tells students. “If the work you do was purposeful and had meaning behind it, that’s going to be way more beneficial than going out there and ripping golf balls for three hours. And, honestly, you’ll end up feeling a lot better at the end. Not just physically, but mentally, as well. You’re going to actually look forward to going out and playing the game.”
