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Profile: Vicki Woodcock, golf pro at First Tee of Greater Austin
On the map, it looks like a green smudge.
Even longtime Austinites breeze past the nine-hole golf course at East 51st Street and Ed Bluestein Boulevard without noticing anything more than open space. Still, the Harvey Penick Golf Campus — and its mission — sneak up on the unsuspecting visitor.
Insiders know that the campus is home to First Tee of Greater Austin, which teaches life skills through golf. Readers of this newspaper also might recognize youngsters who have scrambled out of desolate backgrounds to win scholarships on college teams or other honors through this nonprofit that built and maintains the campus. Each day, smaller victories can be witnessed, transformations that take mere days, not years.
“A couple of weeks later, I saw that same child, he came running up to me, took his cap off, shook my hand, introduced himself again,” she continues. “That’s what you see change with those kids.”
Personal transformations have periodically fused with Woodcock’s golf life. She went pro after her late father Lennues Woodcock manifested Alzheimer’s disease in his 50s.
“His passion was to retire and play golf,” says Canadian-born Woodcock, 63. “And he never got there. I shared his passion. He got my brothers and me involved. So I turned pro in 1994 to live my passion.”
Short, fit and focused, Woodcock spent her first 35 years in picturesque Vancouver, B.C., never far from her businessman father, artist mother, Bonnie Paxton Woodcock, and two younger brothers.
“I was more of an athlete than a student until grade 12,” she reports, as a wicked crook alters her ever-present smile. “Then I excelled at subjects I liked.”
One of those subjects was accounting, which she later studied at the University of British Columbia.
“I really wanted to be a computer programmer,” she says. “But at that time they didn’t hire women as programmers.”
Woodcock subsequently owned accounting, computer-training and health food businesses in Vancouver and Houston before taking up the life of golf pro — a PGA and LPGA member — in Palm Springs, Calif. in 1996. She had competed on the amateur level previously. Her comparatively diminuative 5-foot, 2-inch-high frame didn’t hinder her game.
“Because of changes in the equipment, it used to be better to be shorter,” she says. “Now it’s better to be taller. Tall people get more leverage. Used to be that Ben Crenshaw had the ideal build for a golfer, now Tiger Woods does.”
She taught seasonally, until 9/11, which altered the travel plans of her clients.
“Everyone went home after one month instead of six months,” she says. So she moved to Central Texas in 2003. Here, she met Jennifer MacCurrach, then the executive director of Austin’s chapter of First Tee, founded by Jay Watson, Tom Martin and John Ellett, who remain on the nonprofit’s board of directors.
Woodcock mentored students and taught in the LPGA golf progrm while serving as substitute instructor for First Tee’s Young Guns program for ages 5-7.
“That’s when my interest changed from golf to wanting to give as many kids as possible the opportunity to build character through teaching them life skills, core values and healthy choices, using golf as the vehicle,” she says.
“Values that will last a lifetime. I saw such immediate results in the kids’ attitudes.”
She joined First Tee as it began to expand beyond the green course it built in partnership with the nearby YMCA, which had taken over the steep hill above Walnut Creek from IBM. Last year, First Tee imported 12 students at a time for six weeks. This year, Woodcock has helped set up classes at the schools, mostly in East Austin.
The Manor school district under forward-thinking superintindent Andrew Kim has incorporated First Tee’s developmental program into all elementary classes. Recently, the group hired a University of Texas golf star, Jeff Bell, as resident coach.
While away from the campus, Woodcock, single, still plays as much golf as she can, in between traveling to spots like Brazil, Chile and Venezuela.
Even while driving a complete columnist and golf dunce around the manicured course, Woodcock stays on her recruiting message: “We are always in need of more mentors and they don’t have be golfers, just wanting to make a difference in a childs life.”
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