Meet Coach Ish and his program.
Meet Coach Ish
Ish Gonzales has fifteen years of experience working with junior students. Ish began his teaching career with the Nike Golf Learning Center before establishing his program at Oak Creek Golf Club in 2008. The Ish Junior Golf Academy was recently featured in Orange Coast Magazine and America’s Best Adventure TV on KCAL9.
“I teach everyone buy my main focus in juniors,” said Coach Ish. “They’re regular students for years and years. For kids, these are like piano lessons.”
Just as successful piano teachers engage their students, he feels the same. Whether he’s teaching a beginning golfer the basics or helping advanced juniors fine-tune their game, he’s all about “making it fun for them. I really relate well to kids and communicate on their level. At the end of every lesson, I make sure to include some games with the winner winning some kind of prize. That really keeps their attention.”
That combination of learning and having fun is what makes Coach Ish and his academy successful. He works with over 140 students and offers three kinds of lessons: group (six golfers); semi-private (four golfers); and individual.
Before coming to Oak Creek, Coach Ish worked for eight years at a local Nike Learning Center. He places an emphasis on encouraging juniors to play competitively, and currently has dozens of current and former students playing high school and college golf.
“Whether a parent wants to expose their child to the game, or whether a junior really wants to get serious about improving and advancing, we do it all here,” he said. “And I think the key to our success is that it is fun, and that is what makes them want to keep coming back.”
Our Program
This program offers group, semi-private, and private lessons for all levels of junior golfers ages 4 to 17. Our philosophy to learning golf is for kids to have fun. Ongoing contests coordinated with drills, keep the instruction fun and the students enthusiastic about the game. My personal goal is to prepare students for tournaments and High School golf play. I’m also a US Kids Golf certified instructor.
Group programs have a student ratio of 6:1 and include swing and short game instruction. A free trial group lesson is offered to new students. Contact us for available times and group lesson schedules.
Semi-private lessons have a student ratio of 4:1 with a more individual approach to swing and short game instruction. Lessons include video swing analysis with The V-1 Golf System.
We also offer private lessons for the student ready to move to the next level. With private lessons, the learning curve is much faster.
Important to maintaining an interest in the game, our program offers lessons with “On the Course” play where students apply swing and short game skills. On the course, instructions include golf etiquette, course management, and rules of the game. This instruction provides a young golfer with the skills for organized junior tournament play or high school team golf. Here the students have the opportunity to play golf on a regular basis. More importantly, golf course play opens the world of playing golf, creating excitement about playing the game.