Every golf coach has a list they’re not using: the hundreds of former students who already know them, already trust them, and stopped taking lessons years ago. In Episode 11 of the Jetta podcast, Coach Mike and Jetta creator David talk about why those golfers — not strangers — may be the biggest opportunity Jetta creates for a coach.
The list you’re sitting on
Coaches spend on advertising, social media, and referrals chasing golfers they’ve never met. But every instructor who has taught for years has something more valuable: former students who already paid for their help. The problem was never the relationship — it was the reason to restart the conversation. “Want another lesson?” is the same product the student stopped buying. Jetta gives the coach something new to say.
A remote game-review session
The format is simple: a video call, no golf balls required. Coach and former student look at how the golfer actually plays — rounds, clubs, misses, targets, decisions — and ask the interesting question: why isn’t Tom scoring better? Golfers always arrive with a self-diagnosis (“my irons are terrible”), but the evidence often tells a different story: the seven-iron is fine, the wedges aren’t bad, and the real leak is a driver with a large right miss.
Execution, decisions, or both
That’s the idea at the heart of Jetta. A golfer loses strokes to execution, to decision-making, or very often to both — and those are different coaching problems. Tom’s driver miss is an execution problem. Choosing driver on holes where that miss brings water and out-of-bounds into play is a course-management problem. Same penalty, same score, different reason — and therefore a different lesson. Fixing the swing doesn’t fix the decisions: the golfer still has dispersion and a normal miss, and still needs to score with today’s game on Saturday.
What a remote session looks like
Pull up a hole the student played. “What happened here?” “I hit driver into the water.” Don’t say “don’t hit driver” — ask where he aimed and why. Overlay his actual dispersion on his target; his right miss overlaps the water. “What happens if we move the target? What if we use three-wood?” The student isn’t hearing a lecture about course management — he’s practicing the decision, hole by hole, even hundreds of miles apart. Maybe driver is absolutely right on the next hole. The lesson: understand your game, understand the hole, and make the decision that gives you the best opportunity.
The coaching cycle
After the lesson, give him something to do: play the course in Jetta before the next session, or spend three rounds concentrating on tee-shot targets. Then meet again and review — did the decisions improve? Did the results change? Diagnose, teach, practice, review, adjust. That’s an ongoing coaching relationship, not “lesson, goodbye, see you when your swing breaks again.” And it often leads back to swing work anyway: the evidence might reveal the driver has become a genuine technical problem — a legitimate reason for an in-person lesson.
Listen to the episode
Episode 11 – A Reason to Call Your Old Students Again — Coach Mike and David on former students, remote game reviews, and the diagnose-teach-practice-review-adjust cycle: https://rss.com/podcasts/jetta-golfgame-series/3212415
Sitting on a list of former students? Try Jetta and give them a reason to hear from you.