Juliette Falls Golf Course Gator Junior Golf Lessons

Gator Junior Golf was founded in 2016 and began with passionate golf coaches and an underserved need for youth in the greater Gainesville community. Golf has historically had many barriers to entry that makes it intimidating and oftentimes financially unattainable to get started. Our Founder and Executive Director, Sean Warner, moved to Gainesville to attend the University of Florida in 2011. At the time, no organizations existed to teach junior golf—so began our journey. Our vision is to provide equitable opportunities for the children in our community to develop life skills through the game of golf regardless of socioeconomic status, race, gender or physical ability. Our founding directors and officers drew on their experience with First Tee to establish Gainesville’s first nonprofit junior golf program. Today, we have a program that reaches 450 kids with 30 coaches annually and a footprint that spans six golf courses in three counties in north central Florida.

Our primary program started with individual weekly golf classes held once per week for 8 weeks, two seasons per year. These individual weekly golf classes are the ones you can sign up for here on our website and are open to any youth aged 4-17. Through this program, we offer individual need-based scholarships. Shortly after our founding in 2016, we partnered with two after-school nonprofits, Girls Place and Reichert House to deliver golf instruction at no charge to the organizations or their participants. These two organizations cater to children that are underserved and/or at-risk. Fast forward to 2022 and we also have golf programs with Shands Children’s Hospital and Special Olympics of Alachua.

Gator Junior Golf’s founding team designed the teaching curriculum to center around three core principles of character development, team-building and mentorship. We have 7 class levels where kids are exposed to an age-appropriate curriculum. For character development, we teach our core values such as honesty and respect. Our kids learn how to exhibit the core value on the golf course, at home and at school. Kids participate in team-building games to learn how to work with others in a group setting and how to handle social conflicts. The kids in our advanced levels are encouraged to volunteer for the beginner level classes to earn community service hours and mentor the younger students. Several years after our founding in 2016, many of the kids that started with us are now volunteer mentors.