Bringing Golf to East Harlem’s Girls

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Camil Mateo, 16, is a member of East Harlem Pride, a new girls golf team made up of students from several high schools in East Harlem. Here she was practicing at the Mosholu Golf Course in the Bronx.

It was on the first tee at the Mosholu Golf Course in the Bronx that Teddy Griffith introduced a group of teenage girls to golf.

“The number one thing is, you watch where your ball goes,” he said teeing up a ball, which prompted Franceska Taveras, 17, to speak up.

“Can I just say something?” she announced to the others. “If you lose your ball, it counts as two strokes against you.”

Mr. Griffith, 30, then said, “Well, we’re not focused on scoring right now, but you do have to count your swings.”

He continued to explain the game to the nine girls playing Mosholu’s first hole together. The girls carried handbags and backpacks and they shared one small golf bag. There were balls falling off tees, dribbling grounders and complete misses. It took a half hour for the group to even approach the green.

This is how the season started in September for the East Harlem Pride, a team made up of girls from several public high schools in East Harlem, including Park East, Central Park East, the Heritage School and the Coalition School for Social Change.

There were complete beginners like Fati Haruna, 17, who on that first hole hit a grounder into a sand trap and said, “Ugh, I’m so over this game. Why would they put sand here? Isn’t it hard enough?”

Fast forward to a more recent day, when the girls had new golf bags, better swings and a grasp of golf strategy and etiquette. The team, which continues to practice and play informal matches, has played nine competitive matches since September, mostly against schools with more experienced players, and finished with a respectable record of four wins, four losses and a tie, Mr. Griffith said.

That was a good showing, he said, considering that for many of the girls, when they came out for the team “it was the first time they ever held a club.”

Most of the girls’ parents - many of them immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, China, Sierra Leone and other countries - had no knowledge of the game.

Fati had to explain the game to her parents, immigrants from Ghana, she said.

“Even me, the only thing I knew about golf was ‘Happy Gilmore,’ ” she said, referring to the 1996 film in which Adam Sandler plays a golfer.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Most of the girls had never played golf before joining East Harlem Pride.

Mr. Griffith, who lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and plays guitar in a rock band called Five O’Clock Heroes, is a substitute teacher at several of the East Harlem schools these players attend. Having grown up playing golf in Connecticut, he said, “I thought it’d be interesting to introduce the girls to a sport that probably never entered their consciousness - get them interested in something different.”

The Pride began as a school club two years ago, but Mr. Griffith, seeking to expand the roster and elevate the team’s quality, began popping into classrooms last spring and announcing that he was looking for players.

“Some kids laughed - maybe it seemed ridiculous to them because golf has that stereotype of being white and suburban, but I wound up with, like, 100 names.”

Of that, roughly a dozen girls turned out for Mr. Griffith’s springtime practices at the Randalls Island Golf Center’s driving range.

Financing from the Public School Athletic League, which oversees the 23 girls golf teams competing in the city, covered green fees and subway fare. Mr. Griffith raised about $1,500 on Indiegogo, a fund-raising website, to help buy equipment and pay for lessons and cab fare to courses like Pelham-Split Rock in the Bronx, which is not served by a nearby subway line.

Kevin McCarthy, the principal of Park East, donated a golf bag and allowed the girls to keep their clubs in his office and gather there after school before walking to the 103rd Street subway station for the ride to Mosholu.

Matches began in September against better-prepared and better-equipped teams from Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Technical.

“We weren’t ready but we had enough players, said Mr. Griffith, who made sure to take the girls out for pineapple-topped pizza after matches to keep up morale. “For some of them, their first time on a golf course was playing a match.”

The team lost its first match to Hunter College High School, but then beat the more experienced Stuyvesant team by forfeit, after a Stuyvesant player had not been properly entered on the athletic roster.

With long travel times and slow play, the matches were cut short by darkness after four or five holes - never the usual nine holes of a typical high school match.

Kaiyun Chen, 16, from Woodhaven, Queens, provided consistency. Katherine Nunez, 17, a softball player, packed the most power off the tee. And her friend, Yailizabeth Castillo, 17, a senior from Washington Heights, kept the girls in a good mood with her jokes.

At Mosholu, the girls took lessons from Todd Bordonaro, a Mosholu teaching professional, who early on, covered the grip, stance and swing technique, and told the girls who wore dress shoes to start wearing sneakers.

He added that they could put the sneakers in their backpacks while traveling to the course, “if you’re afraid it’s going to ruin your statement.”

Mr. Griffith said that the experience has instilled confidence in the girls.

“They can actually hit the ball now and feel like, ‘Wow I can actually be good at this,’ ” he said. “Whether or not they’ll play more golf in their lives, hopefully they’ll just be more open to trying more positive things.”

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times The team raised money on the Internet to help pay for many of its expenses, including fees to play on golf courses.