Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Alison Curdt remembers that kids couldn’t play organized sports in her city’s leagues or parks programs until they were 8 years old. Once that magical bell rang for young Alison, nothing could stop her from competing in all sorts of team and individual sports. Nor would it take long for her interest to turn to golf.
“My family belonged to a country club, and while my father played golf I’d hit some balls down the side of the fairway next to him with a cut-down 5-iron,” said Curdt, a teaching professional and psychotherapist at Wood Ranch Golf Club in Simi Valley, California.
She began winning most of the three-hole golf tournaments set up by the club for its kids. While she attended Marquette High School in suburban Chesterfield, Curdt would establish herself as one of the top high school golfers in the state in the late 1990s. With her growing golfing prowess, she caught the attention of recruiters from some of America’s best NCAA Division I college golf programs. In 2000, she accepted a full golf scholarship to Florida State University.
Though Curdt describes her college golf career as “a bit of a struggle,” she was selected twice as an Academic All-American. She graduated from FSU in 2004 with degrees in psychology and professional golf management, with the latter degree giving her an accelerated route to her Class A PGA of America certification.
After Curdt decided against pursuing a full-time LPGA Tour playing career, she landed her first job as a club professional at the Westin Resort’s Mission Hills Golf Course in Rancho Mirage, California. Teaching the game there represented only a small part of her entry-level duties, but her lesson load increased at her next job, at the Trilogy Golf Club in nearby La Quinta.
In 2006, Curdt’s Palm Springs house burned down, a tragedy which traumatized her. She briefly returned to St. Louis and the support of her family. She accepted a temporary club pro job at Whitmoor Country Club, where her family held a membership during Curdt’s teenage years. Brian Maine, Whitmoor’s director of golf, made a contact for her at Callaway Golf, “and I became a member of their club pro staff,” Curdt said. “For some reason, those clubs that Callaway sent me represented a new start for me in golf.”
Soon back in California, Curdt took a job at Golftec in El Segundo, a small waterfront city in Los Angeles County. There she would give 300 half-hour golf lessons a month, an experience which she said “helped me hone my craft as a teacher.”
The phrase that heads Curdt’s website today, “Where you find the best version of yourself,” evokes the young woman’s own path toward the upper echelons of the world of professional golf. In 2007, Curdt accepted a position as club pro at the prestigious Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, California, just northwest of L.A. She says that under the tutelage of director of golf Ian Langford, she learned “how to be an elite golf professional at a high-end country club.”
Curdt won more LPGA sectional tournaments and qualifying events she was entering, and qualified into a total of seven LPGA major championships through her performance in the LPGA Professionals National Championships. Such play led to Curdt winning the prestigious Southern California PGA Women’s Player of the Year award, also seven times.
A partial list of her many honors includes: Southern California PGA vice president (later this year she will become the organization’s first female president); one of only two golf instructors to have earned master professional status from the PGA and the LPGA; Golf Digest Top 50 Teacher in America; LPGA Top 50 Teacher; 2019 SCPGA Golf Professional of the Year; 2016 SCPGA Teacher of the Year; and 2015 LPGA National Teacher of the Year.
“Alison is a great player and a great teacher,” said Nikki Gatch, the SCPGA’s executive director. “She’s the full package who is involved in so many things and who gives 100-percent focus to everything she does. As a teacher, she always breaks down complex ideas about the swing and explains them in simple ways.”
Curdt also makes use of her imagination on the lesson tee, Gatch said.
“I keep my golf playing and teaching separate, and I work on mindfulness to stay engaged and focused on the one thing I’m involved in at a given time.” — Alison Curdt
“Alison had me play the role of her golf student in a presentation on her teaching she gave to our group. After noticing some tension in my swing, she had me put two potato chips in my mouth and told me, ‘Don’t crunch them while swinging.’ It helped.”
PGA pro Billy McKinney, himself the recipient of the SCPGA’s 2018 Teacher of the Year award, adds that “these awards that Alison continues to rack up represent more than a recognition of her many talents. They are significant achievements that move our game forward.”
Curdt earned a master’s in clinical psychology at Pepperdine University in 2013, and was awarded a doctor of psychology degree from California Southern University in 2018. So, she doesn’t stop using her talents and abilities after she gives her last golf lesson of the day at Wood Ranch. As a licensed psychotherapist, Curdt sees clients during her evening hours. While specializing in working with golfers and other athletes, her practice welcomes others as well.
On AlisonCurdtGolf.com, her views about teaching are a sophisticated blend of the psychologist’s scientific objectivity of and the individualized values/search for meaning required of psychotherapists.
“My teaching philosophy is a student-centered approach allowing me to use a vast approach of modalities to help students reach their goals,” she said. “I work with students’ abilities, skills, physicality to help them reach the goals they have set for themselves.”
One might wonder how a person manages to shift between the intense inner focus needed to play golf at its highest level, and the outward-oriented attention to others which is required to help them play their best golf and/or understand themselves more deeply.
“I keep my golf playing and teaching separate,” Curdt said, “and I work on mindfulness to stay engaged and focused on the one thing I’m involved in at a given time.”
Curdt plans on playing up to 24 tournaments this year while continuing to grow her teaching and psychotherapy practices. She will keep up a full schedule of speaking engagements around the world on the topic of the intersection of golf and psychology, in which she has become an industry leader. With two other experts as co-authors, Curdt is near the completion of what she describes as “a holistic golf book that will integrate the fields of golf psychology, fitness and nutrition.”
It’s hard to imagine Alison Curdt filling out a better version of herself than the one with which she graces the golf world right now, but stay tuned.