BY MATTHEW RUDY
Tim Cusick, PGA of America Head Coach and PGA Master Professional,PGA of America Coaching Center, Frisco, Texas
Nobody at the PGA of America Coaching Center in Frisco, Texas, leaves after the Wednesday staff meeting.
Tim Cusick (above), a PGA Master Professional and the Head Coach at PGA Frisco, oversees six full-time coaches, a seventh on the way and 16 separate pieces of technology. When the meeting breaks up, the coaches stay in the room another half-hour and one of them, on a rotation, walks everybody through how he or she actually uses one technology tool.
“It could be something everyone uses differently and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s actually good,” says Cusick, a Golf Magazine Top 100 Instructor since 2019. “But I want everybody to learn how everybody else uses it, so they become much more confident. And, truthfully, our younger coaches teach us as much as we teach them. While I have enough knowledge to be dangerous, they grew up on this.”
Getting a staff fluent is a different project from deciding what to buy, and the buying standard starts with brutal honesty.
“You never want to be house poor, and you don’t ever want to be technology poor,” Cusick says. “You’ve got all this technology in the world and it looks great, but at the end of the day it’s costing you more than it’s bringing in. After that I want to know what’s actually different about it, whether it has any history, whether instructors having success are using it, and how it relates to the students you teach. A coach working with elite players needs something different than a coach teaching whoever paid the green fee this morning.”
The PGA of America Coaching Center features cutting edge tech, like the PuttView indoor putting visualization system installed on two practice greens in the heart of the facility. For a coach building an intial setup, Cusick suggests starting with hardware everyone already has in their pocket. During PGA Education seminars for PGA Associates and PGM students, he has the room pull out their phones and count the golf-specific apps on them. The average attendee has eight, and the record is 47.
“Your phone handles your video, and you can use a variety of tools that will organize and analyze that video,” Cusick says. “You need a launch monitor to be in the game, and you can get into one for around $1,000,” he says. “At that price I care more about whether it’s consistent than what else it does, so test a few against each other and find out whether it’s better inside or outside. Then a putting platform. Six feet of turf on a concrete floor and a SAM PuttLab, and you can become an expert with that thing.”
More than three decades ago, at Hank Haney’s former golf ranch in McKinney, Texas, Cusick figured they were on the cutting edge with curved monitors, dry erase boards and VHS tapes ready for students to take home at the end of a lesson. Now, a setup can look like a college physics laboratory, and cost tens of thousands of dollars. It requires plenty of vigilance to both learn emerging tech and sort between the nice-to-haves and need-to-haves.
“If you don’t stay fresh and up to date with technology, on top of having that teaching foundation, you’re going to get left behind,” he says. “And people do.”
