Fred Kroner
fred@mahometnews.com
David Sebestik spent time last week making introductions at Lincoln Trail School.
The Mahomet-Seymour graduate wasn’t promoting himself, but his sport.
Sebestik is the golf professional at Lake of the Woods and also the boys’ varsity golf coach at the high school.
Working in conjunction with Lincoln Trail physical education teacher Luke Hearn, they presented the basics of golf.
“It’s a community give-back program,” Sebestik said.
Awareness was his biggest goal.
“When I was a kid in P.E., we played everything,” Sebestik said. “Hockey. Roller skating. Basketball. But golf never got an opportunity to make it into the schools.
“This was a way to get golf clubs in kids hands and introduce golf to kids who may not otherwise swing a club.”
He didn’t bring the actual equipment used by those who play the Lake of the Woods course.
The Champaign County Forest Preserve signed off on the purchase of SNAG (an acronym for Starting New At Golf) equipment, which Sebestik said can be used “to teach younger kids in parks or gyms.”
The balls used were tennis balls.
Sebestik made the rounds daily for four days, covering about 11 P.E. classes a day and almost four dozen classes by week’s end.
“I got to see each kid roughly twice,” he said. “We did putting, chipping and station work.”
Late in the week, Hearn was decked out in a sticky suit with Velcro and walked around the gym as the students practiced hitting.
“He was walking with targets on him,” Sebestik said. “The kids practiced aiming at the target and trying to hit him.
“They get gratification from hitting the target, and it sticks, so they know they did a good job.”
Sebestik called the program a “success,” although it is too early to tell how much interest it will foster in the future.
“At elementary P.E., you try to introduce kids to as many things as possible and allow them to choose from there,” Sebestik said. “A lot of them may never think about it again, but a lot of them did say they loved it. Hopefully, it kick-starts it.”
Sebestik will be back with reminders and more of an in-depth look at golf in April, when it will be one of the twice-a-week after-school BLAST classes that will be offered during the month.
Those classes last for an hour, which allows him more than twice the amount of time he had while venturing into the 30-minute P.E. classes.
“With 30 minutes, there’s not a lot of time to do much,” he said. “I tried to get them to hit the bottom of the ball.
“If I tried to get in-depth with fundamentals, I would have lost them.”
Sebestik, who pitched the idea for a golf unit at Lincoln Trail to principal Jeff Starwalt last fall, believes the nature of the sport will appear to some youngsters.
“The reason I grew to love golf is you get to hit every shot,” he said. “There’s no waiting for someone to pass you the ball like in basketball or for the ball to come to you in the outfield in baseball.”
