From one of the first kids to wear a FTIE hat, to now serving thousands of kids in one of our highest-need communities!
San Bernardino, Ca – Nine years ago, First Tee— Inland Empire began as a single class hosted on Saturdays at 10 a.m. at San Bernardino Golf Course. Just ten years old at the time, Marshall Berry was one of our first students, and, like many of us, he caught the bug for golf instantly.
Marshall credits Coach Caroline, a First Tee alumni herself, for guiding him in his golf journey. At 13, he had improved his game, but it wasn’t his swing that needed the most work. As iconic golfer, Bobby Jones, once said, “Golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course…the space between your ears.” Marshall’s mental game would fall apart when he hit a bad shot, but Coach Caroline was there to help him pick up the pieces.
Coach Caroline explained that, “All that really matters is the next shot. All I could do is focus on the next thing instead of worrying about what happened in the past.”
Thanks to her, Marshall’s mental game went from one of the worst on his high school team to one of the best. He was able to overcome bad luck and wayward shots. This resiliency translated to real-life in his sophomore year of high school when the Covid-19 Pandemic Hit.
“Freshman year I got really good at my short game and kept up with the team. But then Covid hit and I didn’t play until senior year of high school.”
“Redlands High School happened to have amazing golfers my senior year and I was battling another teammate all season for the sixth spot on our team,” he recounts. “We were constantly back and forth for that spot and despite scoring better, I wasn’t selected to compete in the CBL Championship.”
Sometimes, especially in golf, you get a bad bounce, but Coach Caroline taught Marshall how to bounce back, and while he was disappointed at not competing, that didn’t dim his passion for the game.
“When things go poorly, or not according to plan, I’ve gotten better at being resilient, taking a deep breath, assessing the situation and then doing my best going forward.”
Soon after graduating, Program Director, Matt Silver, asked Marshall to join as a coach for the FTIE SBCUSD After-School team, where we serve kids directly at every elementary school in San Bernardino City Unified, eliminating a transportation barrier so many kids face today.
Here, we introduce golf to kids who might normally never be exposed to the game, which is part of the reason why Marshall coaches. “Golf has a problem where it’s just expensive, and I’m going to teach this kid, and give them an opportunity to play a game that they would probably never even touch, and if they don’t fall in love with it, it’s still great that they’ve tried it. It lets them dip their toes in something that might otherwise be completely excluded for them.”
Coaching, however, comes with its own surprises. “I’ve always been good with kids, but the biggest learning curve of coaching was that kids shoot straight,” he says – and he doesn’t mean their iron shots.
One afternoon, a little girl walked up and asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty,” he replied.
“No way,” she said. “You must be lying. You can’t be twenty. You’re too short and have pimples.”
Thanks kid.
And while the kids keep him humble with their unbridled honesty, they’ve also reinforced the patience he learned through First Tee and at the same time, taught him to be a better coach. “They’ve taught me how to have a calmer presence and in turn, I give them a safe space to land. They don’t have to be perfect. Nobody is.”
From one of the first kids to wear a FTIE hat, to now serving thousands of kids in one of our highest-need communities, Coach Marshall embodies what happens when mentorship, life skills and opportunity meet early in childhood.
When you give, you help kids like Marshall weather whatever life throws at them, because, as he learned a long time ago, “all that really matters is the next shot.”
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