AYRSHIRE FUTURES SQUAD - Junior Convenors invited to make nominations

Junior Convenors throughout the county have been invited to make nominations of junior club members for consideration to be included in the Ayrshire Futures Squad this year.

County Coaching Convenor John Nordbo has circulated all Ayrshire Junior Golf league clubs with a letter outlining the concept and inviting nominations for consideration.

The nominations are not however restricted to Ayrshire Junior Golf League member clubs but can be made from any club affilliated to the Ayrshire Golf Association.

The letter circulated is reproduced below and the nomination form is available to download directly from this web page, via the appropriate link on the left of this page under the 'Juniors Info' heading.

THE FUTURES SQUAD: Ayrshire Golf Association 

We are now in the position to start this new phase in our development programme for young, gifted golfers. It is our intention to create a squad of 18 under-14 golfers who will receive coaching from our nominated golf professionals. It is hoped that in doing so many of these youngsters will go on to represent their county and maybe even their country.        

The first step in this process will be to select the boys who will feature in this squad. It is intended to have an assessment day near the end of June/beginning of July and we need your nominations of potentially young gifted golfers to assess. First and foremost they need to be under 14 on the 1^st of January,2012. Secondly, and probably more problematic, we are looking for boys who have exhibited above average skills for their age and who you believe have the ability  to go on and become single figure handicappers in their later teens.

I know it is very difficult to define “potential” particularly over an age group where physical development alone can be so diverse. We will want their handicap record to indicate their development rate but this will only be as a guide and handicap alone will not be used as the determining factor. It will be useful if the boys have performed any of the performance tests and you have records of these tests. We will use these tests in our assessment of the boys, particularly in the short game area.

At this time I will not impose any restrictions on the number of boys you can nominate from one club but if the numbers become too many to be accommodated on one day, some sort of pre assessment may have to be implemented, so while I would expect you to advise the boys and their parents of their nomination please add the above proviso.

I would be grateful if nominations could be forwarded to me no later than the 16^th June and you will find a form attached to this letter, one of which needs to be completed for each nomination. I thank you for your assistance in this matter and hopefully together we can start to prepare our next generation of successful Ayrshire golfers.

John Nordbo,

Coaching Convenor