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LAURA LEEJunior players flock to longtime golf enthusiast and instructor Matt Mitchell.
OLDSMAR - He was smart. Made her laugh. Told her things that made her feel good about herself.
After that first day, Amanda Dick knew he was the one.
Two months after taking her first lesson with Matt Mitchell, Dick won her first major junior golf tournament in Aventura, shooting a three-day total of 222.
Dick, now a senior at the University of Florida with plans to turn pro, has been taking lessons from Mitchell since she was a junior at Countryside High. Four years in Gainesville have not stopped her from swooping home to get a lesson from Mitchell.
It may not be the same as Michelle Wie flying to Sarasota to catch a lesson from David Leadbetter, but when it comes to young golfers in this area, Mitchell's schedule is filled with some of the best.
His students include River Ridge senior Heather Hagerman, the Sunshine Athletic Conference's golfer of the year; Berkeley Prep No. 1 Dana Turker, twice an all-county first-teamer; East Lake senior Brittany Jones, a three-time all-county first-teamer who has accepted a full golf scholarship to Youngstown State; and two-time state champ Brittany Lincicome, now an amateur on the Futures Tour as she prepares to turn pro.
Mitchell's reputation is local, not national. He isn't rated or ranked by any golf publications as one of the top 50 or 100 teachers in the country, but area pros see how he has helped some of the area's young talent.
"I'd say in the Tampa Bay area, if there's five top teachers, he's one of them," said Jim Slattery, head pro at Belleair Country Club and president of the PGA West Central Chapter.
"Matt has made a full-time commitment to teaching. He's definitely got the respect and made a serious commitment to learning and studying it."
Mitchell is a fit 5-foot-9, 46-year-old who sometimes exposes his head of graying, thinning, hair to the Florida sun, leaving his hat crumpled in a bucket of balls next to him. He is half of the Mitchell-Nease Academy, which he and partner Dan Nease run out of the golf practice facility at Tampa Bay Downs. They met when Mitchell gave Nease a golf lesson 14 years ago and they opened the academy a little more than a year ago.
Before then, he spent about seven years teaching at the Countryside Golf Center.
Mitchell officially entered the business at 19 when he started as an assistant pro at Innisbrook. He had to do everything short of cutting the grass and it didn't take long for him to realize he didn't want anything to do with the management side. If the job didn't involve playing or teaching on the course, he wasn't interested.
"I don't want to sell clothes," Mitchell said. "I could do that at JCPenney."
The voice mail on Mitchell's cell phone fills up every day. He gives the number to all of his students. "Call me any time," he says after every lesson to every student. And he means it.
Teaching six days a week, 10-13 lessons a day, about 2,000 a year, Mitchell sees hundreds of students. He charges everyone the same price, $70 an hour and $40 each half-hour (juniors can get a reduced half-hour rate). In one week he had a 76-year-old man who was trying to smooth out his swing and a 5-year-old boy just trying to have fun. Though juniors make up less than 15 percent of his clientele, they're the ones who call.
"Kids trying to get better," Mitchell said. "They're usually hyped up before a tournament and want advice."
Lincicome calls him after every round. She said she never has had a teacher she could do that with.
"He can tell me one thing I'm doing wrong and I can fix it," Lincicome said.
Lincicome started taking lessons from Mitchell about a year ago when she couldn't take commuting to Jacksonville every other week (what could be a nine-hour round trip for a four-hour lesson). He was recommended by a friend, and with her transition to the professional game going well, starting the year with three wins, she said she has made the right choice.
"If you do something wrong, he has a reason why you did it and 10 other reasons to go with it," Lincicome said. "I really like his style of teaching. He's changed who I am, just by being positive."
Andrew Turker, a sophomore playing at Cornell who has known Mitchell most of his life, said Mitchell can work with his sister, Dana, a technical player, and still get results out of him, a more physical player.
"He has a great eye," Turker said. "He can communicate what he needs to."
Dick is so high on her teacher she convinced one of her Florida teammates to come down and take lessons, too.
"After I go see him, I'm excited about golf," Dick said. "He is so high energy about golf, it rubs off on you. He makes you want to be a better player."
Word of mouth has been good to Mitchell. Almost all of the students discovered him through a friend. Jones spent about six months without an instructor before she heard enough about Mitchell to take a lesson last spring. Eleven-year-old Dakoda Dowd, who already is playing in tournaments against girls several years older, has been seeing Mitchell almost a year. Last month she won a region tournament, beating college-bound seniors. Clearwater pro John Huston, who went to high school with Mitchell, sends his 11-year-old son, Travis, for lessons.
Mitchell has a clipping from a recent newspaper column on golf taped on his office door. Nearly half of the highlighted names are his students.
Golf was in Mitchell's blood early. He grew up playing where his grandfather played, Dunedin Country Club. It's where he got his first hole-in-one and he still holds the course record (62). If he's lucky he plays two rounds a week - anywhere he can fit them in, but most often Dunedin CC.
He still lives in Dunedin, on the same block on which he grew up.
Like most young players, he started out wanting to make it big. He soaked up all he could from the retired PGA pros who made Dunedin their home after several years of the city being the base for PGA of America. He spent hours hanging out, listening to stories about the old PGA in the garage of Irv Schloss - a highly respected and recognized instructor and clubmaker who died in 1984.
Mitchell took lessons from George Fazio, perhaps best known for losing to Ben Hogan in a playoff in the 1950 U.S. Open. Mitchell would show up at Fazio's driving range in Jupiter for a few days at a time. Once Fazio dumped 1,400 balls on the ground and told him to get out his 7-iron.
"When these balls are done, you can find more," Mitchell recalls Fazio telling him.
Mitchell stayed until sundown, swinging away. He made the trek off and on for about a year.
"You could see the boy had it in his heart to be good," said Bill Hook, who gave Mitchell his first lesson at Oak Ridge, now St. Andrews Links. "He is good, but he worked at it."
Hook, a lifetime PGA member who at 80 still teaches five times a week at St. Andrew's, started working with Mitchell when he was 14. Hook remembers people often asking Mitchell to play a round and Mitchell would turn them down saying, "I'm going to hit balls."
"I've always admired him for that," Hook said.
Mitchell became obsessed with the swing - perhaps to the point that it hurt his game.
"Maybe I got too caught up in the mechanics. Thinking too much," Mitchell said. "You've got to let go and play."
His five-spoked wheel philosophy puts equal emphasis on the short game, long game, mental game, fitness and equipment/environment.
Though Mitchell has spent much of the past 25 years teaching, and made a good living at it, he always has played in area tournaments. After shooting his second 59 in 1994, sponsors approached him, he said, asking if he would like to play golf full time.
He went for it, traveling the country playing mini-tours in the minor leagues, but after suffering a herniated disc in his neck, he had to quit after about a year. Mitchell says there was little disappointment in returning to teaching.
"I wanted to teach," he said. "That's my thing."
The dream of being a full-time player hasn't completely vanished. He talks about trying to join the senior tour when he turns 50. He has a minus-3 handicap, meaning he averages 3 under par.
But there may be demands from some of his students to spend more time with them. Lincicome has talked with him about traveling with her, and Dick said she would love it if he could caddie for her. But with a wife and a year-old son, Mitchell has no immediate plans of hitting the road full time.
"That depends on how good they get," Mitchell said. "They've got to get there before that becomes an issue."
- Times correspondent Dave Theall contributed to this report.