AS a self-confessed golf obsessive, Kieran Lynch feels he has landed the dream job.

A former golfer who built an impressive reputation in the junior and college ranks, the Baltimore man is now the PGA professional at his home course, Skibbereen & West Carbery Golf Club.

It’s a role that allows Kieran to share the knowledge and experience he picked up during his own playing career. And there is a lot of satisfaction within that.

When his own competitive ambitions began to wind down, moving into the PGA coaching route felt like the natural progression.

‘Honestly, it really is the dream job,’ he says.

‘When I was finishing up playing, I was kind of at a crossroads with things. I’d tried going down the mini-tour route and I stayed at it for as long as I could. Then Covid hit and suddenly there were no tournaments anywhere, so I was torn over what to do next.

‘I’d done a business degree and a masters in college, so there was always the option of going into that side of the world, but golf was always my biggest interest and I felt I had so much knowledge built up from it. The PGA route became a way of staying in the game rather than walking away from it completely.

‘A lot of fellas, once they finish playing, end up having to go off in a completely different direction to make a living and they lose that connection to the game altogether. I didn’t really want that. Golf was what I’d always done and always known, so this felt like the natural route to stay involved in it.’

Kieran Lynch won the Connacht Boys trophy in 2009.

These days, Kieran is recognisable as the PGA Professional in Skibbereen, and the advice he passes on can be linked back to his own impressive career. 

He spent 15 years playing on the elite Irish amateur and college circuits, racking up some notable wins. 

Kieran won the Irish Faldo Series twice, first as an U16 in 2010 and then as an U21 in 2013. He was an Irish international from 2007 to ’13, was crowned Connacht U18 Boys Amateur Open champion in 2009, and played with Munster from 2006 to 2014. And they are just some of the highlights.

When he was 14, he shot a record 65 in Skibb, the course he perhaps knows maybe better than anyone. That record still stands.

‘I’ve been there since I was six or seven years old. My dad (John) used to bring me out early in the mornings before anyone else was on the course so we wouldn’t hold people up.’

We can trace Kieran’s love for the sport right back to when he was a kid and his grandparents, Paddy and Breda Cahalane, gave him a set of plastic golf clubs.

The realisation that he had to turn in a different direction and stop playing the game was one he had to wrestle with.

‘Yeah, honestly, I battled with that decision for a long time,’ he admits. 

‘I’d seen fellas older than me still chasing it into their 30s and 40s, and I’d played with lads growing up who were still trying to make it work. You hear plenty of stories too where people can end up with very little behind them because it’s such an expensive thing to keep pursuing.

‘Everything you earn basically goes back into it again. The mini tours are tough because the prize money isn’t great, but the carrot dangling in front of everyone is the big tours and the possibility of a breakthrough. That’s what keeps lads going.

‘I’d had a great junior career and things went really well through college too, but once you come out of college you’re very much on your own with it. I was travelling, playing events, doing qualifying schools for different tours – EuroPro, the DP World Tour Q-School – but the standard is unbelievably high.

‘I got to a stage where I realised this was going to be a very difficult road if I kept trying to push it. My game dipped a bit too and I knew there was a huge amount of work needed again to get to the next level.

Kieran Lynch with Grand Slam winner Rory McIlroy in 2010 after the Baltimore golfer had won the Faldo series in 2009.

‘At that point I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to stay in golf at all because you can get a bit burnt out after being at it for so long. But weirdly enough Covid probably helped me because everything stopped for 18 months. There were no mini tours, no events, nothing really happening. It gave me time to step back and think about what I actually wanted.

‘And when I did that, I realised I still wanted to be in golf. It was still what I loved. So the coaching side became the natural progression from there.’

Kieran is now enjoying the coaching side of golf more than he ever thought he would. Initially, that surprised him. But it’s the perfect role for the personable West Cork man who has a knack of explaining things really well – that’s a bonus if you’re a coach.

‘When I was playing, I never really pictured myself coaching because I was so focused on my own game all the time. You’d see PGA pros around and I never thought it was something I’d necessarily get huge enjoyment from. But once I got into it, I realised I actually loved it,’ he says.

‘I always had a big interest in the technical side of the game anyway. Some really good players don’t necessarily know exactly why they do what they do – they just naturally execute shots. But I was always interested in understanding the reasons behind things and how swings worked.

‘So now with coaching, I feel I can really help people because a lot of golfers, even lads who’ve played for years, actually have very little understanding of their own swings or set-up. Sometimes you can give someone one or two simple things and suddenly the game becomes much easier for them.

‘That’s probably the satisfying part of it – when someone says, “Jesus, I never knew that,” even though they might have been playing for 10 or 15 years. You can genuinely make people better with fairly straightforward adjustments sometimes, and I really enjoy that side of it.’

There’s a sense of predestiny here too. After Sarah Claridge, a qualified PGA Professional who had worked at Skibbereen Golf Club for seven years, decided to depart, Kieran was waiting in the wings to take over. It just made sense. He knows the course and the club inside out.

‘The club was great to me because they helped me through the PGA course as well, and Skibbereen was my resident course, which you need when you’re doing the PGA qualification,’ he explains.

‘Before I did the course, I’d already been working in the club for a few years on the managerial side of the golf operations, and since qualifying with the PGA the role has shifted a bit. 

‘I still work a lot with the golf club itself, but now I’m also running junior programmes, ladies’ Get Into Golf initiatives and a lot of the coaching programmes that Golf Ireland and clubs are trying to push. So it’s kind of a mix between coaching, club work and running the golf side of things really.’

He loves his home club too, pointing to its inviting atmosphere, but also the challenge the course presents.

‘It’s a really interesting course because it’s not overly long, so you don’t have to be a massive hitter to play well there. But if you grow up playing Skibb, you’ll definitely develop a good short game because the greens are small and very undulating,’ Kieran says.

‘You’re not going to hit 15 greens a round around there, so you have to learn how to chip and putt properly and scrap for scores. That definitely stood to me over the years. Even now I’d still say the short game would be one of the strongest parts of my golf, and a lot of that came from growing up around Skibb.’

Having the chance to coach at his home club, help fellow golf lovers and follow this new path leaves Kieran with no regrets about stepping away from life as a player. 

He is still very much living the dream at Skibbereen.