Nearly 300 kids will come through First Tee – Western North Carolina this year, spread across four courses in the mountains. It’s the best year yet for a program that started with a single class in 2019, before a pandemic and then a hurricane tested how much a young program could take.

The chapter launched in 2019 as a region of the First Tee – Triad chapter in Greensboro, the work of a couple with Triad ties who wanted to bring the program west. It started small, rotating between Asheville Municipal Golf Course and Biltmore Forest Country Club depending on the year, and it held to that single class for years. Then COVID slowed its early momentum, and a second class, planned for Newland in the fall of 2024, had barely gotten started when Helene swept through the region. A program with that much working against it could easily have stalled out.

Instead, the First Tee found its footing in the mountains. The chapter now runs out of four courses across the mountains, and the numbers tell the story: In 2024, First Tee – WNC reached about 48 kids through one class; last year, across all four locations, that grew to just shy of 200; and this year, it is on track for nearly 300, ages seven through eighteen.

Much of what changed was investment in the mountains themselves. There was no dedicated programming staff until 2025, when Anna Moore came on as program director. An advisory committee of club partners formed the same year, and First Tee’s national headquarters supplied a website and a logo at the start of this year. “Really all of our momentum has come in the last two years,” Moore said of the stretch when the chapter finally had people, support, and an identity of its own on the ground.

Moore was a natural fit for the role. She learned the game at Cedar Rock Country Club in Lenoir, where her grandparents were members, came up through junior golf on a regional tour, and played collegiately at York College of Pennsylvania. When the program director role opened in January 2025, she saw it as a chance to give back. “I really wanted to kind of come back to where I had learned so much about the game,” she said, “and help introduce other kids to golf.”

The chapter runs on First Tee’s national model, delivered locally. Each fall and spring season fields six to eight weekly classes organized around four golf-skill categories: Full swing, putting, pitching, and chipping. Woven into every session is what the program calls a key commitment — integrity, confidence, positive self-image, working with others. “We want to create really talented golfers,” Moore said, “but primarily we want to just create great people who are going to be game changers in their communities.”

Two of the chapter’s programs are homegrown, built with the latitude First Tee gives local regions. Girls Golf Club, which Moore developed with Jayla Rogers, First Tee – Triad’s assistant director of programs and a former high school golf rival turned colleague, launched this spring for a group junior golf has long underserved. It filled beyond capacity almost immediately. “It’s just an opportunity for girls to have their own class that feels like it’s for them,” Moore said.

The other, called PLUS, is designed to keep kids the sport often loses. Around middle school, Moore explained, junior golfers tend to drift toward travel baseball and soccer and away from golf. PLUS is the chapter’s answer — a more skill-intensive track that keeps competitive kids in the game year-round, with a co-ed level for younger players and separate boys’ and girls’ teams once they reach high school. Older PLUS girls have become mentors to the Girls Golf Club, adding a layer the chapter didn’t have two years ago.

The results are beginning to show. Moore launched PLUS last fall partly to hold onto four kids who had been with First Tee and were aging out of the core class, including a set of twin brothers who joined the program in 2022. One of the twins, by Moore’s telling, “just kind of got dragged along” to class before discovering a real gift for the game. Earlier this month, that twin played alongside PGA Tour pro Zac Blair — and two fellow participants from First Tee’s Triad chapter — in the pro-am at the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro. He wants to play in college and make a career of golf, Moore said.

He is not the only one. One nine-year-old plays US Kids Golf tournaments most weekends and recently competed in the Jekyll Island Cup, the organization’s longest-running regional championship. A rising senior spent part of this summer at the Congaree Global Golf Initiative in South Carolina, a program that pairs promising junior golfers with top-100 instructors. “It was really cool to see what he came out of that experience with,” Moore said.

None of it costs a family a cent. The organization originally charged a modest fee in its early years, with scholarships available, before the chapter made the decision to drop the cost entirely and lean on donors to keep every program free. Clubs, balls, and everything a class needs are provided. To reach children who would never otherwise find a first tee, the chapter works through community partners like the YMCA of Avery County, First United Methodist Church in Waynesville, and the Boys & Girls Club of the Plateau, which has hosted two summers of camps reaching about 80 kids.

More than any other partner, it is Asheville Municipal that gave the chapter a foundation to grow from. The Muni is the hub — home to the most kids, the most classes, and the player-development track that became PLUS — and it has supported First Tee through the chapter’s hardest stretch. PGA professional and general manager Patrick Warren, along with Friends of Asheville Muni, provided the chapter with office and storage space, all in a period Moore described as nothing short of turmoil since Helene. “I just really want to thank our golf course partners,” she said, crediting Mountain Glen Golf Club, Waynesville Inn & Golf Club, and Red Bird Golf Links in Sapphire alongside the Muni.

Registration has been open since mid-July, and classes begin August 24 at all four locations. Sign up now to make sure a spot is waiting when the season starts.

A program that puts golf clubs in a kid’s hands for free — in a region where junior golf opportunities are limited — runs on the goodwill of people who already love the game. The chapter is small enough that a few donated clubs or a Saturday spent helping at the course makes a real difference, and there are several ways for WNC golfers to help.

For a chapter that has already come through a pandemic and a hurricane to reach nearly 300 kids, a little help goes a long way. “We couldn’t do it without our volunteer coaches,” Moore said — and this fall, plenty of ways to help are within reach for local golfers.

Thanks to Anna Moore for agreeing to be interviewed for this article.