Coach Kelley Hester took over the Furman women’s golf program in 2012. She has since brought the winning tradition back to the program with 2 wins this fall at the Golfweek Program Challenge and the Furman Invitational. The team also finished ranked 26th in the Golfweek rankings. She sat down with Recruit PKB College Consultant Brandi Jackson to discuss her coaching philosophy and advice to junior golfers going through the recruiting process. Check out part 2 of the interview.

 

What do you look for with a resume?

Well I like to see scores and I like to see you where you finished in the field in relation to the size in the field and I like to see yardages. I don’t need a lot of commentary about weather or wind. I can certainly look up and see what the other scores were for the tournament but a lot of times we will see things that say “I finished first in this tournament or third in this one” and if I’m not familiar with event I don’t know. Especially if it’s an international kid and it was a huge tournament that I’m just not familiar with, and it happens a lot with the US kids with state type of events that we might not be aware of and maybe you finished five out of 50 and maybe you finished five of six I don’t know. And maybe it was a par 70 golf course versus par 72 or 73 golf course so your score might make a difference so information like that is good. I do like to see some extracurricular if you have them, I think balance is important, I don’t think that we just need golfing machines especially at a school like Furman where it’s going to be encouraged. We do some community service work, it’s mandatory through the athlete department, through the university. It’s a strong academic school so I do ask for transcripts so it never hurts to go ahead and send that, test scores are good if you have those. I would recommend to players that they personalize the letter they send to a coach, that don’t just say “Dear Coach” they say “Dear Coach Hester” and maybe even you tied a little something about the school “Dear Coach Hester I saw your team finished second at the tournament couple weeks ago that’s great” or “I see that your team is ranked ___”. It’s good for us to know that you’re not sending a form letter, the same thing to ten different people, just like it wouldn’t be so cool if we did that to a recruit. So unfortunately most kids are committed by the time we can actually send them a letter so the heat is off of us on that side a little bit but I just encourage kids to do their due diligence and show who they are through their correspondence.

What do you like to see with a swing video?

The odds are I am going to get to watch the kids play at some point but if I have to rely on a swing video I’m going to be looking at all of those things so probably on the range not so much on the golf course. It’s really hard to determine ball flight on video. Slow-motion is good, instructor notes can certainly be helpful. There are certain things that we love to see kids working on so you know if it’s in that area that is great for us. And it shows us that maybe they have a good teacher if we aren’t familiar with the teacher or the student has a good idea or a good grasp of what they need to work on and they’re owning it and that’s huge. Trackman numbers don’t lie. TrackMan, Flightscope numbers are good and a way of standardizing numbers. At the end of the day, in order to compete at this level you do need a certain speed, period. And if you don’t have that you’re not going to be able to get it when you get here, you can increase some clubhead speed through certain things but it’s not going to drastically change. If you’re in the 70s to low 80s clubhead speed with your driver, you probably don’t need to be at the top of D1 golf.

How much does distance play a factor in the recruiting of a player and them being able to compete at the D1 level?

I mean I’m not saying that you have to be longest but it’s going to be hard to be competitive if you’re the shortest, if you’re in the middle of the road that’s not too bad because we can assume that you’re going to get a little bit stronger over the time during college but if you’re having trouble getting to par 4s in junior golf it’s probably not gonna get easier once you get to college. There’s nothing wrong with that I just think you need to you need to pick a level where you can be competitive, wherever that is and the speed is the one thing that I just think is not going to improve that much once you get to college, maybe a little bit, but if you’re at the slower end then I think it’s going to be hard to be competitive.

How much of an impact does how a player dresses and behaves on the golf course have on your decision?

I think we take it all and as a coach you’re watching how young ladies are on the golf course , how they groom themselves, how they act with their competitors, with their parents, with all of those things. I do know one thing that is happening is the students are staying the same age and I’m getting older so I think that I’ve become more flexible in this area because you have to, this is like my 17thor 18th year doing this. But it’s important to me, we want to know you can take care of yourselves, we want kids that are going to take care of their uniforms, uniforms aren’t cheap, and you want kids that are going to represent your university in a way that is positive. So we can’t un-see certain things and I think it’s important for recruits to know that coaches are going to take in all that information.

 

Do you look at potential recruits social media? What are things you are looking at if you do?

We are a little limited on who we can friend and things like that, but there’s probably a good chance that I might have players that are friends with some of the kids and if there’s a lot of drama popping up then that’s probably going to come to the surface. Just like we tell our college kids that a future employer is going to monitor and go back to look at somebody’s Facebook photos and language and things like that. This is one level down but college coaches are gonna be looking at some of this junior golf business so I think it’s important to be careful what you put out there about yourself. And I will tell my college players the exact same thing, it doesn’t change or get any better and it’s really only going to become more so as you get older and once you put things out there, they are out there. We didn’t have this was when I was a kid, thank goodness, but kids have so much more responsibility in terms of the things that could have a potential impact on their lives. I would just say that if your grandmother’s not gonna be okay with it, then it probably doesn’t need to be up there