Week 4: Interviews With a Side of Rejection

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the blog! I’ve just gotten back from the golf course after a day of coaching and interviewing, and I wanted to share my initial thoughts while they’re still fresh in my mind.

First of all, outreach is… hard. If you’ve ever wondered how those Costco employees feel asking if you want to learn about their new Verizon plan, trust me… it’s not great. However, I chose to do this, so I put myself through every awkward rejection in the book. In the midst of all of that, though, I was lucky enough to sit down with five interviewees, who made all of the rejection somewhat worth it.

While the majority of my interviewees were Latino today, I had an interesting conversation with a white coach about his thoughts on minority rise, just to see what his opinions were on the outside of the phenomenon. Consistent with my initial assumptions, he attributed the majority of the recent success golf is seeing among minorities to the pandemic effect, especially regarding the influx of minority golfers that First Tee has seen in post-pandemic seasons. While I’d agree with his eye test, my work next week will hopefully revolve around the demographic data that confirms these assumptions with actual statistics from pre and post pandemic seasons.

An unexpected initial trend, however, was that the Latino community found golf to be the sport most aligned with their values. In more than one instance during this week’s interviews, I heard that the ability to build relationships while playing your sport is something that resonates with the values and cultures built in the Latino community. In one of my first interviews, a Latino First Tee participant — who had only gotten into the game this past fall — said that, as excluded as his community was from the game, it was actually the sport that he feels like they’d enjoy the most. In his words:

[My biggest selling point to them would be] imagining driving around a big golf course in a golf cart with your friends, drinking a cold one while hitting balls, and even if you don’t hit good, you can still live in the moment with others.

Multiple people talked about how the camaraderie of golf was a breath of fresh air compared to the isolation of a sport like basketball. One noted that even though golf is an individual sport, you feel like a part of a group when playing with strangers or friends. In comparison to a team sport like basketball, even if you hit a big three, your job is to get back on defense rather than celebrate. Finding community in random tee times strongly resonates with these minority groups, who are seeking connection in everything that they do.

However, some have admitted that this goal to find community sometimes backfires, especially in a sport which many agree is still riddled with prejudice and discrimination. When speaking to a lead coach from Sacramento, he described the unsettling middle ground between full respect from his playing partners and outright prejudice. On multiple occasions, he mentioned, other golfers changed their tee times when they realized they were playing with a Latino golfer, or seemed selectively distant in favor of speaking to his white counterparts. Especially because we’ve now determined that this social connection is a driving factor to get this community into the sport, this common feeling that there’s a subtle element of prejudice following them onto the course is often enough to deter them from coming back.

But, obviously, they are coming back, or this project would be completely useless. I think if I had to summarize this week, it would be about understanding the failures that the sport has committed that have deterred millions from joining the game firsthand. However, as much as my interviewees brought up the failures, they had their own solutions. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a topic for next week. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to writing up the next edition.