2026 Award Winners Spotlight: Mark Williams, PGA

“Grow the game.”

Golf says it a lot.

Sometimes it means building a new driving range. Sometimes it means getting more rounds on the books. Sometimes it means putting a few more young golfers on a leaderboard.

But if the phrase is supposed to mean anything, it should look something like what Mark Williams is doing in Columbus.

Williams isn’t looking for kids who already have golf in their lives. He’s looking for the ones who don’t.

Through his work with Columbus City Schools and the Southern Ohio PGA’s Clubs Fore Kids initiative, Williams has spent the last several years building something that barely existed before: a pathway into golf for kids who might never otherwise find one. When the program began, Columbus City Schools had just four high school golf teams across its 16 high schools. 

As of today, that number had grown to 12. The long-term goal is all 16.

The clubs are part of it. So are the clinics.

But the real work begins much earlier.

Williams and his staff have gone directly into Columbus schools to recruit students, sitting in lunchrooms and talking to kids who may have never stepped onto a golf course. More than 250 students expressed interest after those visits, with nearly 100 eventually registering for clinics. More than 50 completed the three-day program and earned a set of clubs.

This isn’t golf marketing.

It’s access.

And access matters because golf can give a young person things that have very little to do with a swing: patience, accountability, confidence, resilience, a place to belong. For some kids, the golf course becomes the first place where they learn that improvement is something they can create for themselves.

Williams understands that.

He also understands that none of this happens without somebody willing to do the unglamorous work. The school visits. The clinics. The coordination. The partnerships. The logistics. The administrative hurdles. The endless pieces that have to line up before a kid can simply stand on a putting green with a club in their hands.

Williams keeps lining them up.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Mark Williams, PGA works with a Columbus City School student at a Clubs Fore Kids summer clinic at Champions Golf Course. (Photo by Brett Hiltbrand/Southern Ohio PGA)

In 2025 alone, the programs he helped lead through Columbus Recreation and Parks reached more than 1,300 participants across Clubs Fore Kids, Youth on Course, Golf with Us, PGA Junior Opportunity League and PGA HOPE.

And he isn’t doing it alone. Williams has pushed members of his staff to pursue PGA HOPE certifications, helped create opportunities for Associates to lead programming and even worked directly with Columbus City Schools golf coaches to help them become better instructors and leaders.

That’s the other part of his legacy.

He’s not simply building golfers.

He’s building the people who will build golfers after him.

There is something fitting about that. Because if Mark Williams’ work has taught us anything, it’s that growing the game isn’t about how many people you can convince to play golf.

It’s about who gets the chance to discover it in the first place.

And in Columbus, because Mark kept showing up, hundreds of kids are getting that chance.