Every year the county development programme organise one of its monthly sessions so that all the groups (6 x 16 juniors) come together and meet at the same venue to enjoy a day of golf development and playing opportunities. This year was no exception with around 90 juniors plus Cornwall Golf officials representing both the ladies and men's sections enjoying a day packed full of thought provoking golf development ideas. This time round Matt Tucknott Director of Junior Development for Cornwall managed to secured the services of the much sought after, well respected and highly qualified Psychologist, Dan Abrahams.

Dan  has been working with golfers since 2002 and he is currently the Lead Psychologist for England Golf. Being a former professional golfer and PGA golf coach, he has the knowledge and experience to help golfers of all abilities get the very most from their game. His psychology techniques and performance philosophies are simple to understand and easy to apply.

Dan's experience covers other sports including soccer where he has worked alongside some of the best coaches in the game and has been praised for the originality of his methods. He works one to one with some of the leading figures in the managerial world to help them develop a world class winning culture and a high performing team.

Dan's credentials and qualifications were always bound to guarantee a great day for all the juniors that attended the two hour long sessions throughout the day and it was no surprise that the feedback during the day from both the players and the parents has been highly positive. The perfect facilities at The Point enabled the different activities across the day to run smoothly and the County can't thank them enough for facilitating such a great opportunity for our County juniors.

With so many good points discussed during the sessions I'm sure all the juniors took away different tools and techniques to work on during their time they spent on the golf course this year. I personally will be looking at how we as a county can encourage and support the juniors we help develop by working together on a few main aspects with them. Those areas are:

A) Accepting the fact golfers of all levels can't always play their A game, we must encourage a willingness and desire to try and get the most out of our games on any particular day whether that is A,B,C or D game. A very interesting point made was that Rory Macilroy's "C" game scores ranged between 8-shots and he certainly has won competitions playing his "C" game and getting the best out of it in terms of score (-4!) 

B) A.N.T.s (Automatic Negative Thoughts). We all have them, it's human nature, if we didn't we would have probably got eaten by Sabre tooth tigers! The difference now hopefully is we will all be squashing those A.N.T.s as best we can and refuse to hit a shot on an A.N.T!

C) Game Face. Thinking about a world class player that you would like to be like and trying to copy their body language and the way they go about their business of making birdies and winning tournaments sounds like a winning formula. Think about how they would walk into the pre shot routine.  Confident / Focused / Relaxed? How they set up, Solid / Strong / Athletic? How they swing, Committed / Flowing / Focused? Then copy them and start winning like them!

The whole day fitted perfectly with this year's programme and Dan's sessions were aligned well with what we are trying to achieve in our county structure, in terms of giving our players the understanding of the importance of key areas which affect their golf. Dan explained very simple but effective systems that I believe all our juniors can relate to and reinforces what we have seen time and time again - whichever level game the juniors bring to the course they can still get a good result from it as long as they deal with their ANTs and grind out the best score possible for that particular round.

Report by Matt Tucknott, Director of Junior Golf Development for Cornwall.

Pictures to follow .....