Youth Player Development Award
While legacies have a way of coming into focus late, Chris Yoder’s impact can be seen and felt without the benefit of time or years. One trip to a PGA Jr. League event or a Team Ohio training camp and the impact Chris has had on young golfers becomes clear as day.
For the fourth time, Yoder has been named the Southern Ohio PGA’s Youth Player Development Award recipient. Three of those have come now in consecutive years, another recognition of the work he has done at Scioto Country Club and throughout the Section to make junior golf about something larger than the next tournament.
By now, the award feels less like recognition of a body of work than another brick laid in a legacy that is still being built. Because Yoder has never seemed particularly interested in building junior golfers for the sake of building junior golfers.
He’s building young people who happen to play golf.
That distinction sits at the center of his philosophy. His junior programs emphasize competition and skill development, certainly, but also character, resilience, sportsmanship and the ability to navigate the world beyond the golf course. The champions are important. But so are the kids who eventually discover that the lessons they learned on a golf course have followed them somewhere else.
It is a quieter kind of success. It doesn’t always show up on a leaderboard. But over time, it accumulates.
A lesson here. A conversation there. A young golfer who needed someone to believe in them. A family that found a community through the game. Another player who grows into a leader and, someday, perhaps becomes the person standing beside another young golfer who needs the same encouragement.
Those are the bricks Yoder is laying.
And perhaps the reason he understands their importance is because someone once laid a few for him.
Yoder’s first steps in golf were taken alongside his father and a PGA Professional named Dan Priest. Priest became an early influence in Chris’ life, introducing his father—and, ultimately, Chris himself—to the game and to the people who make golf more than a sport. That relationship helped create a pathway that eventually led Chris to a life in the profession.
Now Yoder is building that same pathway for another generation. There is something wonderfully circular about it.
A PGA Professional once helped a young Chris Yoder find his way into golf. Decades later, Yoder is doing the same for dozens of young people across Central Ohio, only his ambition reaches beyond teaching them how to play.
He is helping them learn how to live.
And somewhere down that path, the legacy will be measured not by how many champions Chris Yoder produced, but by how many young people became better versions of themselves because he was there.
For the fourth time, the Southern Ohio PGA is proud to recognize Chris Yoder as its Youth Player Development Award recipient.