Chris Armanini, PGAGolf Instructor,Kaanapali Golf Courses,Lahaina, Hawaii2023 Aloha PGA Teacher & Coach of the Year
W
hile many golf facilities are continuing to enjoy the ongoing golf boom, the game was dealt a severe setback on the Hawaiian island of Maui in 2023 that still reverberates. The city of Lahaina, home to the Kaanapali Golf Courses, was decimated by a wildfire, and the recovery is protracted and ongoing.
“The rebuilding process is coming along slowly, with the first rebuilt houses going up in Lahaina,” says PGA of America Golf Professional Chris Armanini, a lifelong Maui resident and the 2023 Aloha PGA Teacher & Coach of the Year. “Housing is being built first, then businesses will come back, but it’s going to take three-to-five years. In the meantime, tourism is way down and my instruction business is down more than 25 percent.”
As the Head Teaching Professional for Kaanapali, Armanini works with resort guests and local juniors. Resort traffic is slowly rebounding, and a junior program that once numbered above 100 players dropped as low as 19 before starting to grow again late last year.
Armanini has shifted his focus to other ways to grow as a teacher and generate business during the rebuilding phase in Lahaina. A lifelong skier, he found an opportunity to teach the sport in Japan during Hawaii’s slower summer months. When he saw the demand for snowboarding coaches in Japan, he decided to learn that discipline to expand his business and his overall coaching knowledge.
“I had done a little snowboarding in the past, but I saw it as a chance to put myself in the shoes of my golf students who are just starting out,” Armanini says. “I took some lessons, and it taught me a lot about learning, especially with the language barrier. Now I’m in my second season of coaching snowboarding, and I really understand the challenge of a beginner better than I did before.
“The biggest difference with golf and snowboarding is the stakes. In golf, if you hit a bad shot you find it and hit another one. In snowboarding, your decision-making can be life or death on the mountain. That’s definitely a different dynamic for a coach.”
Armanini is also augmenting his traditional golf instruction with more virtual coaching with students from around the world who he first worked with at Kaanapali. His students send him videos, then he responds with his own video messages or FaceTime calls. He intends to keep growing this portion of his business because it’s fulfilling, and there’s an appetite for it.
“I have a student in the 8th grade in Germany, and we just talked right before she played in a tournament – then she went out and played her best round by eight strokes,” Armanini says. “I love it because it keeps me in my golf brain when I’m in Japan teaching snowboarding. I think that’s goto be a big part of my personal business going forward, and it will give me a chance to keep working with so many students that wouldn’t see me again after they visit Maui.”
