Labradors and Little Golfers… (and 10 minutes)

Two things I love very much, black labs and little golfers.  Being a lab lover, I have now trained multiple dogs to be my hunting buddy.  One of the things I have come to recognize is that teaching a lab to retrieve is very similar to teaching a child to play the game of golf.

My playbook for teaching my dogs to retrieve was titled Water Dog by Richard Wolters.  In this book, Richard explains an important principle that I have applied to my two girls in learning golf that has changed my teaching approach to introducing golf.

Before I share this tip, I first want to highlight the similarities between kids and labs; both are full of energy, have short attention span, love pleasing their parents, enjoy the outdoors and are quick learners.

In teaching a youngen’ (dog or kid), it is critical to match the teaching process to the attention span.  Anytime the exercise goes beyond the prime learning time, you will get start to get a diminishing return (and potentially a negative output) by going past ones attention boundaries.

With Ally or Katie as it relates to golf, I have adopted the “10 minute rule.”  Being that if I can get 10 minutes related to golf, then I consider the golfing adventure a success.  Ironically, these are the same principles that Richard Wolters applies to developing world class retrievers.

So the next time you go to the golf course… lose the idea of wanting solid attention for 30 min or a hour… get your 10 min and know that you and your child had a productive day!