When Nikki Gatch thinks back on her time playing in Desert Junior Golf Association events in the desert in the 1980s, she remembers two things: the great opportunities for juniors, and the man who made those opportunities happen, Dave Shackelford.
“What made Desert Junior Golf special was the entire community got behind the program,” said Gatch, who has gone on to a career in golf and is now the executive director of the PGA of Southern California. “We were able to play some of the most prestigious courses in the valley as kids. I remember playing Vintage, PGA West, La Quinta Country Club, I could go on and on. And the doors were always open and families were welcomed and I remember just the community and obviously the golf professional embraced it.”
For Shackelford, who passed away in late November, his efforts for junior golfers in the Coachella Valley will be his legacy in the desert. But that legacy began far away from the desert years earlier, one desert pro remembers.
“Starting the summer of 1975, when I was 9, I was in Dave’s junior golf program at the Cedar Rapids Country Club (in Iowa),” said Nick DeKock, now the head pro at Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage. “My first meeting with Dave was at the Ceder Rapids Country Club, where he was head pro from 1974 to 1982. During that time I traveled in pro-junior tournaments with Dave throughout eastern Iowa. I just spent a lot of the time on the driving range with him.”
Shackelford eventually moved to Arizona before coming to the desert in the 1980s and once again taking up the cause of junior golf. What Shackelford created at Desert Junior Golf was a chance for juniors to play high-profile courses for a small fee, but often in the heat of the summer.
“I talk to so many people who were in that era with me and and it’s like, gosh, how did we do it?” Gatch said. “But you know, we didn’t know any different and we were just playing golf and playing all of these amazing places and creating all of these lifelong friendships. I mean, I know that sounds cliched, but it is true.”
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“First and foremost, you had so many friends that were playing, it was like a gathering every time that you got together,” said O.D. Vincent, a star golfer at Palm Springs High School and later a touring pro and Division I men’s golf coach. “And golf in the valley, I thought that in the mid- to late-1980s when I was in high school down here, I thought that this was the epicenter of golf in the United States, the Palm Springs area. We had so much pride in representing the Coachella Valley that having Desert Junior Golf Association events down here, you just wanted to A, support it and B, this felt like where all the best players were.”
DJGA was pretty much the only junior golf program in the desert at the time and its reach went to most of the desert’s courses.
“It was the biggest. It was thriving. I remember the big trash bins with the lids on them,” said Dave Menke, who grew up in Palm Springs and is now the head pro at Sunrise Country Club in Rancho Mirage. “They were locked, but they had a hole as big as a golf ball, and they were at every club. After a round, a golfer would put in their old golf balls and those would be collected and handed out to the kids. I thought that was really cool.”
Eventually Desert Junior Golf, a year-round program that saw more than 100 kids play in many of its events, drifted away, with new junior programs like the First Tee and SCPGA junior tournaments taking over. When Menke and his friends and Vincent decided to try to recreate DJGA with their Coachella Youth Golf program, they naturally reached out to Shackelford.
“We had a lunch at Thunderbird a couple of years ago,” Menke said. “It was a nice way for O.D. to see Dave again and for me to get to know him and learn a little bit more about what he did and ask him his thoughts on how we could run it and make it successful.”
Coachella Youth Golf has been a success, completing its third season last summer. Some of that might be from the template that Shackelford put together in the 1980s. But Shackelford also might have influenced kids to love golf, and in some cases that led to careers in golf like for DeKock, Gatch, Menke and Vincent.
“Dave built the foundation for so many of these other successes you mentioned, and it was just part of a burgeoning, I use the term vibe, golf community down here,” Vincent said. “You’ve got to attribute a lot of that to the man Dave Shackleford was. The values he lived his life by and exuded and what he passed on.”
For those who were part of Desert Junior Golf in the 1980s and into the 1990s, Desert Junior Golf with its box lunches and access to top-end courses was a great era for juniors in the desert when juniors were trying to find anything to do in the dead time of summer. And for those like DeKock, Gatch and Vincent who went on to careers in golf, Desert Junior Golf and Dave Shackelford get a good part of the credit.
Shackelford is survived by his partner, Patti Piper, his son Dave Jr., and daughter, Laura.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Dave Shackelford remembered as force behind Palm Springs area junior golf
