The full golf experience

Manheim Township graduate Jeff Ritter is earning a national reputation as a golf coach.

Sunday News

Jul 19, 2009 00:13 EST

Mohnton

No sport spins off more gurus than golf.

There are course-design gurus, equipment gurus, psychology-of-golf, swing-theory and technique gurus.

Jeff Ritter is becoming a guru of the full golf experience.

Ritter, a 37-year-old Manheim Township High School graduate, is fast earning a national reputation as a golf coach.

He might even be expanding the definition of that term.

Based at Arizona State University's golf complex in Tempe, Ritter is on the list of top teachers in Arizona in the latest issue of Golf Digest magazine. He's also been listed among the top teachers in the Western United States by Golf Magazine.

Ritter spent last week at LedgeRock Golf Club, a private club in Berks County, giving extensive two-hour individual lessons to members.

He's done the same sort of thing in Great Britain and all over America with plans to soon do some coaching in Australia.

"I try to find out what [students'] goals are," Ritter said Wednesday. "Then I try to figure out what are one or two things they can change.

"Very often, the thing that's wrong will be the same with the driver and the putter.

"I might spend the better part of the first hour on full-swing mechanics. Eventually we'll get to bunker shots, chipping, green reading, putting routine. ...

"That two hours goes a lot faster than you'd think."

And if a student stays with Ritter for the long haul, he'll get advice on nutrition, training and motivation for life.

Words like "holistic" and "zen" get thrown around.

"I really got into this by trying to figure out how to help myself," he said.

That's been a long process. It began early. Ritter is the son of longtime Meadia Heights Golf Club pro Doug Ritter, now retired.

"I was spending all day at the golf course from the time I was 3 years old," Jeff said.

Ritter was part of the golf dynasty at Manheim Township that included Jim Furyk, Terry Hatch, Matt Abernethy and Jim Buch.

"By the time I was in high school, I was thinking about golf as something I would do with my life," Ritter said.

That generally means one of two paths: become a playing tournament pro or a club pro.

Ritter wasn't cut out for the PGA Tour, but neither was he cut out for "the 70-hour work weeks I saw my dad put in."

Still, Ritter went nominally down that path for a while, attending New Mexico State, which at the time had one of only three golf-management programs in the country.

Then he took at job at the Atlantic Club, one of a string of famously tony, big-money clubs on Long Island.

Lucrative, but not Ritter's thing.

He took gigs with short-game guru Dave Pelz, then with Golf Digest Instructional Schools, and got the chance to learn at the feet of teaching legends Mike LaBauve, now based in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Jim Hardy of Houston.

Hardy's video, "Correction vs. Creation," blew Ritter away and put him firmly in the "single plane" school of swing method.

Somewhere in here Ritter began writing instructional stuff for Golf Tips Magazine, eventually Golf Digest and finally Golf Punk, an edgy British golf magazine that allowed Ritter to cut loose creatively.

For a time Ritter wrote a monthly column in Golf Punk, each piece inspired by an incident or problem that occurred in one of Ritter's real-life lessons.

Now Ritter's tips are done up in Golf Punk with lavish, colorful illustrations and graphics.

In the May issue, Ritter appears in a nearly psychedelic-looking aquatic-themed layout for a piece on green-reading.

"When it comes to mastering the art of green reading using your imagination is the key. I like to find in my mind the 'flow' where water would go rushing across the slope towards the downhill direction of the hole. Just like waves carrying surfers to the shore, your ball will ride the line of least resistance chasing the fall line to the cup."

Ritter works with minitour pro Todd Murphy and a number of good junior and college players, but he has yet to hook up with the big-name tour pro that can propel a teacher into the celebrity pantheon with Butch Harmon, Hank Haney or David Leadbetter.

"You can't base a career on finding those players," Ritter said.

"They have to find you."

Not that Ritter isn't out there. He has a book coming out late this year. He has two Web sites.

He's on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. He says around two-thirds of his business comes from the Internet.

"I'm lucky to do a lot of writing," he said. "I'd like to leverage the power of the Internet to get into a lot of things. I'd like to get into public speaking

"I don't want to become stale or stagnant. That's why I don't always want to be doing the same thing."

Mike Gross is assistant sports editor of the Sunday News.