Sean Casey

Head Teaching Professional

Clublink Academy at Glen Abbey

Oakville, Ontario

Achieving Goals

If you want to be one of the best teachers of golf in Canada, you have to set goals.

Sean Casey, head teaching professional at the ClubLink Academy at Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario, is an expert at fixating on a target, and putting an action plan in place to get there.

Casey, who grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick and is a graduate of the business program at the University of New Brunswick, left school to move to southern Ontario with one goal in mind: to get a position at the perennial home of the Canadian Open, Glen Abbey.

It took awhile, but Casey reached his goal in the fall of 2000.

In 1998, Casey got his pro card while going to university and working at Westfield Golf Club in Saint John.

In 2000, he got his first Ontario job at Victoria Park in Guelph. Still, in the fall of that year, he put in a call to Tom Jackson, who was then in charge of Glen Abbey.

The next year, Casey was on staff. In 2004, he took over as head of the Academy there.

“I was always a big fan of Greg Norman and I remember watching him play at Glen Abbey. When I got a job there, I remember the first few years just driving in the gates and getting goosebumps just being there.”

Being at Glen Abbey and teaching with a staff of nine, winter and summer, means being organized and motivated.

Casey, a dedicated TaylorMade user, always wants the 200 to 300 attendees to the Academy to be fixated on their goal: developing a better golf swing.

Casey sets up the programs and is still one of the hands-on teachers. The team effort at the Academy – “we’re all part of the decision-making process” – is one of the reasons why it’s one of the most respected in the country, and one of the busiest.

“We set our expectations high,” says Casey, “and we work our butts off.”

The Academy works on the technical, physical, emotional and nutritional aspects of a golfer’s game, and imports people like Paul Dewland (PureMind Golf.com) to help attendees “rewire bad tendencies.”

Dewland is an INLPTA Certified Trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and has been working as a performance coach for over 15 years.

Got the yips over putts? Dewland thinks he has the cure.

As for the swing, Casey is an expert at breaking a bad one down, and rebuilding it with a good one.

Still, it takes time and patience – from both a player and instructor angle.

“You have to understand how the old swing functions to fix it,” says Casey. “We help them understand the process.”

If students don’t reinforce their new-look swing, old tendencies will come flooding back. Casey thinks a lot of swing problems are because players are using clubs that don’t fit.

“If we flatten out a person’s swing, he (she) might need different clubs to make it work,” he said.

Helping him and the other instructors find that immortal sweetspot is the TaylorMade MATT system (swing analysis). It’s being installed at the Academy this year and Casey can’t wait to get into “some quality analysis and fitting.”

People are using the wrong clubs “all the time,” he says.

Casey likes the full slate of equipment offered by TaylorMade, including adidas apparel. He also likes the continuity of the feel and look.

“There’s no ‘oh, geez, I have to use their wedges,’” he says about using the TaylorMade clubs.

“I’m always trying to grow and improve myself and I wanted to align myself with a company that wants to be the biggest and the best.” This is how he describes his relationship with TaylorMade, now in its 4th year.

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