The Long Game: Why Mental Skills Matter Most in a Golfer’s First Year

Ivar van der Moolen, founder of the Mental Toughness Programme, on why the tools developed for Olympic athletes and tour professionals matter even more for the golfer who is just starting out.

Most beginners quit within two years. The reason is rarely the cost or the difficulty. It is that the game stopped being enjoyable – and the mental skills that could have changed that were never on the coaching agenda.

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Most coaches have seen it. A new student arrives – enthusiastic, committed, turning up to every session, asking good questions. Twelve months later, the bookings have stopped. When you make contact, the answer is always vague: “just got busy,” “life got in the way,” “it wasn’t quite working out.” Golf didn’t stick. They moved on.

The industry calls this dropout. It is generally understood as a participation problem – something for national associations and governing bodies to worry about, to address with access initiatives and marketing. For the individual coach, it often feels like the natural attrition of a hard sport. Some people take to it. Others don’t.

But there is a question underneath this that is rarely asked: what if the dropout is not primarily about the difficulty of the game? What if it is about how the game feels to play in the early stages – and what if coaches have more influence over that than they currently use?

The Research Finding Coaches Should Know

Studies on sport participation consistently identify enjoyment as one of the strongest predictors of whether a beginner continues playing.

Not technical improvement. Not scores. Not external encouragement or access to good facilities.

Enjoyment.

Players who report enjoying their sport in the early stages of participation are significantly more likely to still be playing two or three years later. Research specifically on youth sport dropout estimates that roughly 70% of young people who begin organised sport have left it by their early teens – with lack of enjoyment and low perceived competence consistently identified as the leading causes.

Adult beginner golfers are not a different category. The motivational dynamics are the same, even if the social pressures differ. A new adult golfer who finds the game enjoyable – who leaves sessions feeling capable and looking forward to the next one – is building a relationship with the game that can last decades. One who finds it only stressful, frustrating, and exposing will eventually stop coming.

Mental skills coaching – the tools that make up the Mental Toughness Programme – is, in large part, enjoyment coaching. The same framework developed with Olympic athletes and tour professionals addresses the exact factors that determine whether a beginner stays in the game.

The Misconception That Costs the Sport Players

Mental skills work – anxiety management, concentration training, confidence building, imagery, motivation – are almost universally positioned as high-performance tools. Elite athletes have sports psychologists. Tour professionals talk about their mental coaches and the edge they provide. The implicit message is that these are tools you earn once you have reached a certain level of the game. Beginners, by this logic, should focus on the basics first.

This assumption is wrong. And it costs the sport a significant number of players every year.

Why Beginners Need It More, Not Less

The experienced golfer has something the beginner does not: coping strategies built from thousands of hours of play. They know what it feels like to recover from a poor shot. They have a library of good rounds to draw confidence from. They have a pre-shot routine that manages anxiety because it has been performed ten thousand times. The mental game has been developing, unconsciously, throughout their career.

The beginner has none of this.

For a new golfer, every shot is a first-tee moment. The anxiety that experienced players feel at the start of a competitive round, beginners feel on the practice ground in a Saturday lesson. There are no islands of competence to return to – no memory of playing a hole well, no trusted swing to fall back on.

Everything is uncertain, and much of it happens in front of other people.

Confidence follows the same pattern. For an experienced golfer, a difficult session is a blip against a background of proven ability. For a beginner, one poor session can feel like evidence of a permanent truth: that golf simply might not be for them. The evidence base for capability is thin, and it collapses easily – often far more easily than the coach realises.

Motivation is equally fragile. Early motivation is almost always enthusiasm – the novelty of a new game, the social attraction, the aspiration. Enthusiasm is not durable. It runs out, usually when the novelty has worn off and the difficulty is still high. What replaces it, in players who stay, is a sense of genuine progress and genuine enjoyment. Without either of those things, the equation shifts: golf is expensive, time-consuming, and hard. The reasons to stop accumulate.

What Coaches Can Do About It

None of this requires rebuilding a session. Three small adjustments make a meaningful difference with any beginner.

Name the anxiety. Tell beginners explicitly that what they are feeling is normal — that every golfer feels it, that it is the body preparing to perform rather than evidence of failure. This reframe costs nothing and removes some of the shame that makes players stop coming. When anxiety is something that can be named and understood rather than hidden and endured, it becomes far more manageable.

Find one specific thing to acknowledge in every session. Not “well done” broadly – something concrete and observed. “You held your tempo through that transition” or “that was a fully committed swing, regardless of where it went.” Beginners remember what their coach notices. They build their self-image as a golfer partly from what the coach reflects back at them. Make sure that image includes evidence of capability.

Ask why they play – and keep asking. Not just at the first session, but regularly. “What are you enjoying most right now?” “What would make next month feel like a success?” These questions do two things: they connect the coaching to the player’s own motivation rather than the coach’s agenda, and they signal that the coach sees the player as a whole person, not just a technical project. That relationship quality matters for retention as much as any technical skill.

The Business Case, Stated Plainly

A beginner who drops out after one year has yielded one year of income. The cost of acquiring them – time, marketing, administration – is amortised across twelve months of lessons.

A beginner who stays for five years, books camps, refers friends, and becomes a genuinely loyal client is a different proposition entirely.

The lifetime value of a retained player is not a marginal difference. It is the difference between a coaching business that grows and one that runs on a treadmill, endlessly replacing the players who leave.

The coach who helps a beginner feel capable, manage their anxiety, and genuinely enjoy themselves in the first year is not doing something peripheral to their coaching practice. They are doing the most commercially important thing they can do: building the conditions for retention.

Module 5 (Confidence) and Module 6 (Motivation) of the Mental Toughness Programme are particularly applicable for coaches working with beginners and developing players. They provide structured exercises – for home, the practice facility, and on the course – that address precisely the factors that determine whether a new golfer stays in the game or quietly disappears from the booking system.

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