Justin Rose drives to make golf accessible to all

Justin Rose has outlined his “vision” to get golf on the national curriculum after launching a golf academy which aims to get five million people into the sport for the first time.

The initiative plans to make golf accessible to all, irrespective of age, gender social background or ability.

More than 5,000 free lessons for school children will be given away during the first year and the goal is to bring 18,000 young people onto the Justin Rose junior programme across the first five years.

“We’re looking to reach people that might not be exposed to golf in the most traditional sense and certainly not a country-club sense. That’s the demographics we are going for,” Olympic gold medallist Rose told the PA news agency.

“The Academy can be a little more portable in that you can take coaches into communities that haven’t been exposed to golf at all.

“A fun little concept would be going into a skate park and meeting teens that have never played golf and doing a long-drive competition.

“It’s a form of golf, it’s getting them swinging a club and then the idea is that someone gets curious and wants to take it to the next level, ends up going to the driving range and then your journey in the game of golf has begun.

“We’re trying to introduce people to the game in less scary and intimidating ways.

“Schools obviously have a huge catchment of kids and the more that we can expose golf to those children with a great team of PGA professionals behind me, the better.

“It’s nice to do it to that scale and it’s our vision to even one day get the government to make it part of the PE curriculum and get golf into schools in simple ways.

“Golf is a sport for life so you’re giving kids a skillset that might be able to serve them for 30, 40, 50