2026 Award Winners Spotlight: Jon Decker, PGA!

Jon Decker has spent a lifetime teaching golf. The practice tee is where it started, but it has never been the only place he’s wanted to reach people.

There are books, instructional videos, articles, clinics, social media posts and, for a time, a weekly podcast. There are the students who come to see him at the Medallion Club and the thousands of people who may never meet him but have found their way to one of his lessons online.

The platforms keep changing. The purpose has remained remarkably consistent.

For Decker, teaching golf has always been about more than teaching golf.

The 2026 Southern Ohio PGA Teacher & Coach of the Year, presented by GOLFTEC, has built a career around helping people find something in the game — a better swing, a little more confidence, a reason to keep playing or perhaps a perspective that carries beyond the course. 

Now a two-time winner of the Teacher & Coach of the Year Award, his approach is rooted in a genuine desire to make a difference in people’s lives, guided by a faith that has become inseparable from his work.

It’s a philosophy he has put into words, too. In 2016, Decker published Golf Is My Life: Glorifying God Through the Game, followed in 2024 by Fairways to Heaven: One Shot at a Time. The books reflect the connection he sees between golf and his faith, and the opportunity he believes the game provides to encourage and serve others.

That sense of purpose has traveled with him through a career that began at the Grand Cypress Academy of Golf in Orlando, where he spent 12 years learning from some of the game’s most respected instructors. Working alongside Fred Griffin, Phil Rodgers and biomechanics expert Dr. Ralph Mann, Decker developed a foundation that would shape the rest of his teaching career. 

He taught golf schools, private lessons and junior programs, often logging between 1,200 and 1,500 hours of instruction each year.

He later became Director of Instruction at New Albany Country Club, where he oversaw a staff of instructors and developed programs for members and junior golfers. His work there reflected another defining quality: a belief that teaching should be engaging and personal, built entirely around the individual. 

Since 2021, Decker has served as Director of Instruction at the Medallion Club, where he oversees a staff of five to six instructors and develops programming for men, women and juniors. His women’s clinics regularly draw 30 to 35 participants, while a men’s program he introduced in 2024 quickly found its own following. He also continues to work with advanced junior players, emphasizing tournament preparation, goal setting and the decisions that matter once a player leaves the range.

But Decker’s classroom has grown considerably larger than any golf facility.

As a Senior Editor and Contributor for Golf Tips Magazine, he has spent years producing instructional articles and videos, earning recognition as one of the publication’s Top 25 Instructors. He has also built DeckerGolf.com into a home for his teaching philosophy and an expanding library of instructional content. Across his website and social media platforms, Decker has produced nearly 600 instructional videos, sharing everything from swing fundamentals to short-game concepts with an audience that reaches well beyond Southern Ohio.

In 2025, he took that ambition another step with The Fairways to Heaven Show, a weekly podcast combining golf instruction, conversations with PGA Professionals and his broader message about faith and the game. The show produced 18 episodes in four months, generating more than 18,000 downloads and 90,000 views of 15 minutes or longer before its network ceased operations. Even then, the desire to find another way to reach people never went away.

There is a consistency to all of it. Whether he’s working with an accomplished player, introducing a junior to the game or sharing a tip with someone watching from halfway around the world, Decker approaches teaching with the same enthusiasm and the same underlying intention.

The award recognizes excellence in teaching and coaching. In Decker’s case, it also recognizes a lifelong commitment to the people on the other side of the lesson, and the belief that every opportunity to teach is an opportunity to make someone’s life a little better.

He’s spent his career helping people take the next step, one swing and one shot at a time. And judging by the number of ways he’s found to keep teaching, he’s nowhere near finished.