Glover wins accolades for his golf teaching

The director of golf at 3 Creek Ranch won the 2014 award for his outstanding service as a golf instructor.

“It’s a big deal to me,” Glover said. “I’ve been nominated the last three years and finally I won it this year. The Rocky Mountain section, we’ve got a lot of great teachers. To be named teacher of the year is quite an honor.”

There are 41 sections in the PGA. The Rocky Mountain section includes southern Idaho, eastern Montana, western Wyoming, northern Nevada and part of Oregon.

Glover, a golf pro of 25 years, said being a good teacher is to be a student of the game and the golf swing itself.

“With teaching you never stop learning,” Glover said. “You always have to explore different ways to communicate, different ways to teach people the golf swing and stay up to date with all of the latest practices.”

Glover said he has studied hundreds of teachers and techniques to ensure that he can help with any form of yips or shanks in any particular student’s game.

“With any other rotary sport it all starts with the feet and it works up through the ground and through the legs and in the hips and in the torso and in the arms,” Glover said. “Getting people to move functionally in that respect is probably the biggest successful thing with teaching the mechanics of the golf swing. When people understand that it really makes a difference in their swing.”

Once Glover can get his client to maintain a repeatable swing, he begins his work on the mental part of the game.

“We just need to silence their mind and just let them do what they do,” he said. “Once people realize that then it opens up a whole new world for them.”

In 25 years Glover has seen every type of amateur golfer. He works with each person to fix any problems, and he said he has never seen a client he felt he couldn’t help.

“We’ve definitely had challenges, and you just do the best you can with what you got. If skills are really ingrained in somebody it takes a long time to change them,” Glover said. “We just try to get those people functional where they can have a repeatable swing and a repeatable ball flight, and then we let them play with that and go from there.”

With so many world-class golf courses in the valley, 3 Creek is happy to boast the region’s top teacher to pair with its immaculate Rees Jones course.

“It makes us very proud of what Greg has accomplished,” 3 Creek general manager Chad Becker said. “It also helps to prove to the members, and I think our prospective members, on where our focus is on teaching golf and to help everyone get better at golf, and so I think it’s an accomplishment. It means a lot for the club. We’re really proud of Greg.”