BY MATTHEW RUDY
Cesar Balgañon, PGAPGA of America Golf Professional,Southern Arizona PGA Chapter, Tucson, Arizona
When PGA of America Golf Professional Cesar Balgañon II starts working with a new student, the first question he asks has nothing to do with golf. “Have you played any other sports before?” sounds like small talk, but it isn’t.
Balgañon got a late start to the game himself, picking it up at 20 after joining Sewailo Golf Club in Tucson as an outside services attendant. It was connecting golf to the athleticism he developed as a young baseball player that helped him move quickly from a beginner to a PGA of America Golf Professional.
His own journey gives him a disarming quality with beginners. “People say, man, you must’ve been playing your whole life. I tell them, ‘Nah, I didn’t really like golf growing up – I loved baseball, and still do,’” he says. “That brings their guard down.”
And his background as a member of the local Pascua Yaqui Tribal Community means that guard-lowering goes both ways: When fellow tribal members see him on the lesson tee, the game no longer looks like something that belongs to someone else.
Balgañon built his programming model at Sewailo through years of outreach: PGA Jr. League for tribal juniors, short-game bootcamps that flowed into long-game clinics, golf networking events at indoor facilities, and a portable PUTTR putting system he can deploy almost anywhere for pop-up activations. He leans on the PGA Coach app to structure offerings.
“As a PGA of America Golf Professional, you’re wearing seven hats a day,” he says. “The app has these templates for you, and not having an app or a website of your own can be a barrier to even putting programming out there. I utilize PGA Coach a lot.”
When designing a new instruction program, he starts with a phone call to fellow professionals who’ve done it before.
“Those are the folks I go to right away – hey, we’re looking at building something, and this is our goal, whether it’s max participation or a certain demographic,” says Belgañon. “What have you done in the past that worked?” Getting specific about the niche matters: A clinic focused purely on gaining distance with a 3-wood, he’s found, draws people who wouldn’t respond to a generic beginner pitch.
In February, Balgañon stepped into the role of Director of the Southwest PGA’s Southern Arizona Chapter. He’s now transitioning his Sewailo programs to assistant professionals there, coaching the coaches rather than the players. The framing he shares with them comes partly from a familiar source: a roundtable hosted by PGA Magazine, where he spent six hours seated next to 2011 PGA Teacher & Coach of the Year Mike Malaska.
“He said to look at the golf books from the 1800s,” Balgañon says. “Our bodies haven’t changed. People try to say they’ve reinvented chipping, but it’s all there. You’ve got to be a good communicator. Students can only walk away from the hour or two you have with them with what they can understand.”
That manifested in a recent lesson where a player came in complaining that his driver play didn’t resemble the high quality of his iron shots. Balgañon learned that the student had been an accomplished boxer and suggested he hit a few drivers with the same feel he would have while throwing a powerful right uppercut.
The lightbulb turned on, and the student smashed the next shot.
“This game is all about having fun and looking forward to getting out and playing,” says Balgañon, the 2025 Southwest PGA Section Player Development Award winner. “That’s what I’m trying to leave every student with every time we’re together.”
