relax - Swiss Club

I first swung a club at the age of three and by the age of five I was taking golf
lessons. I absolutely loved the game when I was seven years old my parents
agreed to let me join a local golf club. I practically lived there and by the age
of eight had a handicap of 36. Working hard, I brought this down rapidly and
entered many junior tournaments. At one of these I was spotted and recruited
into the Junior Dorset County squad. Soon I was having individual lessons and
my school holidays were filled with golf events.
I was selected to join the England junior squad when I was 12 and
benefited from regular coaching in all aspects of the game plus psychology
and nutrition. By the age of 16 I was training after school, playing at weekends
and my handicap was down to 2! I played for three years as a full-time
amateur before gaining my PGA qualification.
I taught at two golf clubs, one of which had a large junior section.
Realising that I enjoyed teaching and seeing people progress more than being
on the circuit, for the next five years I played mainly friendly events with the
odd national event.
Although happy with my golf career and what I had achieved, I was
starting to feel that perhaps I needed a change in my life. So, I decided to
travel. For the last four years, I have been travelling around playing golf along
the way!
Now I find myself in Singapore, where I have been since May 2010. I’m
very excited about the new opportunities here in Singapore, especially at the
Swiss Club. I look forward to being able to teach new people and getting more
people out onto the golf course—or driving range!
So if you feel you would like to give golf a go or perhaps just need
someone to give you a bit of advice then please feel free to contact me!
Chantal Scott
You can book lessons with Chantal at the Swiss Club’s Golf facility
either through Sajan at sport@swissclub.org.sg or with Chantal at
chantalscottgolf@yahoo.com.sg or 8318 9312.
Relax FEBRUARY 2012
introducing...
chantal scott,
golf coach
talking point:
is golf from
scotland?
The origins of golf have been researched
and discussed for a long time. A golf-like
game is recorded as taking place on 26
February 1297, in the Netherlands, in a
city called Loenen aan de Vecht, where
the Dutch played a game with a stick and
leather ball. The winner was whoever hit
the ball into a target several hundred yards
away using the least number of strokes.
Some scholars argue that this game of
putting a small ball in a hole in the ground
using ‘golf’ clubs was also played in 17thcentury
Netherlands and that this predates
the game in Scotland. There are other
reports of earlier accounts of a golf-like
game from continental Europe.
In April 2005, new evidence reinvigorated
the debate concerning the
origins of golf. Recent evidence unearthed
by Prof. Ling Hongling of Lanzhou
University suggests that a game similar
to modern-day golf was played in China
five hundred years before golf was first
mentioned in Scotland.
Records from the Song Dynasty
(960–1279) describes a game called
chuíwán and also includes drawings of
the game. It was played with 10 clubs
including a cuanbang, pubang, and
shaobang, which are comparable to a
driver, two-wood, and three-wood. Clubs
were inlaid with jade and gold, suggesting
chuíwán was for the wealthy. Chinese
archives include references to a Southern
Tang official who asked his daughter to
dig holes as a target. Ling suggested
chuíwán was exported to Scotland via
continentalEurope by Mongolian travellers
in the late Middle Ages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_golf
35