Dustin Johnson has big plans for 2016 season, golf school at TPC Myrtle Beach

Dustin Johnson returned to the Grand Strand on Monday to fulfill some promotional obligations for marketing cooperative Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday and visit a golf school that is sure to experience growth, expansion and changes in 2016.

The Dustin Johnson Golf School at the TPC Myrtle Beach is essentially the host entity of the upcoming inaugural Dustin Johnson World Junior Golf Championship, which will be played Feb. 13-15 at the TPC and is expected to have an international field of 90 boys and girls ages 13-18.

The school will soon have a home building on the TPC driving range and practice facility, as tree clearing will begin next month to make room for the building and an adjoining parking lot. The building will house hitting bays overlooking the range as well as swing analysis and club-fitting systems and other equipment for use by director of instruction Allen Terrell, who was Johnson’s coach at Coastal Carolina.

“That’s our next step is to have a building,” Johnson said. “But I think coach and myself have done a good job so far. He does most of the work, I just have my name on it pretty much and get to come hang out with the kids once in a while.

“. . . I think it’s great for junior golfers in this area to have Allen Terrell be able to instruct them and for me just to have my name on a golf school, especially at a golf course where I kind of grew up playing, TPC Myrtle Beach. It’s a special place for me. I spent seven or eight years here practicing and playing, playing on tour and playing through college here.”

The school has a performance center building housing a swing analysis and fitting system and other equipment that Johnson originally built for the CCU men’s program, but it is on the other side of the clubhouse in an emerging neighborhood.

Johnson’s school opened in September 2013 and expanded to a location at The Wanderers Club in Wellington, Fla., four month later.

Terrell has been teaching about 10 days a year in China for the past six years – the past two under the school’s name – and said a more extensive program in China is being considered. A new school location in Jupiter, Fla., is also being explored.

Terrell said he and Nick Dou, a partner in Founders Group International, which owns TPC Myrtle Beach and 21 other courses on the Grand Strand, have discussed adding a full academy component to the school that would include full-time lodging and academic schooling at a nearby private school for students.

“We’re looking at the academic piece, which is the most important,” Terrell said. “We have a lot of clients in China and there’s interest to come here full-time, so we’re talking to some local academic schools about developing a partnership, and Nick and I are starting to talk about some lodging options with some of their strategic planning.”

Any potential expansion is being greatly analyzed, however. “Growth is good but we don’t want to just throw up buildings everywhere,” Terrell said. “We want to grow it from here.”

The school currently has some of the area’s top juniors. Patrick Golden of Murrells Inlet, a high school junior who has been receiving instruction from Terrell for the past two years, recently won the Cheraw Fall Challenge, and student Drew Mullen, a freshman at Waccamaw High who recently transferred from Walpole, Mass., won the boys age 13-15 division Sunday in the South Carolina Junior Golf Association Players Championship at Hartsville Country Club.

“Our No. 1 emphasis from the junior perspective is obviously our local juniors,” Terrell said.

But Terrell said the majority of the school’s students are from outside the area, including three from China and one from Sweden who periodically visit the school for instruction, often in the summer. He said more than 30 junior clients are from outside the area.

In China, a business associate books the lessons and Terrell has an arrangement at a golf facility in Shanghai to teach. “We have a pretty strong presence in China now,” Terrell said.

But Terrell is wary of opening a school in China. “There’s a lot of things we’re having to look at,” Terrell said. “China has a little wait and see because right now the government has been kind of anti-golf. And you don’t own the land over there, so they can just come in and shut you down. We don’t want to waste money but we do want to help the Chinese families because there’s just a lot of bad information that they get.”

Many of the better juniors in China are exploring ways to play at U.S. colleges, and Terrell is helping some of them navigate the process.

Some of them may be playing in the Dustin Johnson World Junior Golf Championship in three months. Johnson will not be present. He’ll be playing in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, which he’s won twice, during the first two rounds and traveling to the Northern Trust Open, where he lost in a playoff this year, during the final round.

“I wish I was actually going to be able to be here for it,” Johnson said. “… But I am excited about hosting it, and we’re going to have a lot of great juniors playing in it. Hopefully it will turn into one of the best junior tournaments in the country.”

Johnson came to Myrtle Beach from Atlanta, where he was deposed Friday as part of two lawsuits he has filed in an attempt to recoup $3 million he says he was bilked of after lending it to the law firm of his former attorney and financial adviser.

Johnson is an official spokesperson and ambassador for Golf Holiday, and he played four holes each with foursomes consisting of three Golf Holiday sweepstakes winners and their friends.

Following golf, Johnson did some voice-overs for commercials promoting his junior golf event and the Grand Strand’s spring golf season, signed some memorabilia and conducted a short junior clinic for a few members of his golf school.

Johnson has played in just one of the first six events of the 2015-16 PGA Tour season that comprise what was formerly known as the fall series, finishing fifth in the $8.5 million World Golf Championships–HSBC Champions tournament.

“My first event of the season I finished fifth so another good start to the year,” Johnson said. “… I feel I’m in a good spot going into next year. I felt like I put myself in a position to win a lot more times and more consistently last [season], so that’s what I’m going to look for this year, too.”

He achieved consistency in 2015 with top-10 finishes in more than half of his starts – 11 of 21 – and just two missed cuts, both early in the season. Now he’d like to close out a few more tournaments.

He has nine PGA Tour wins and is the first player since Tiger Woods to win in each of his first eight years on tour. But he has also had legitimate chances in final rounds to win three of the four majors, including a bumpy 12-foot putt on the 72nd hole of the 2015 U.S. Open followed by a 5-foot comeback putt that would have still forced a playoff with Jordan Spieth. He missed both. He also lost to James Hahn in a playoff in February at the Northern Trust Open.

“Hopefully I can capitalize on a few events that I felt like I let go last year, and get a couple more wins in a single season this year,” Johnson said. “… I feel the few times where I had a really good shot to win I feel I didn’t really do anything wrong. I feel I executed the shots and played good golf, just a bounce here or bounce there go my way and it’s a different story.”

Johnson is playing in the 18-player, $3.5 million Hero World Challenge hosted by Woods next week in the Bahamas and will likely begin 2016 in the Hyundai Tournament of Champions in Hawaii from Jan. 7-10.

Johnson is coming off two full weeks away from the game. He said Monday was the first day he hit a golf ball since the final round in Shanghai on Nov. 8. He’s been spending time with fiancée Paulina Gretzky and 10-month-old son Tatum, who will both be regularly traveling with him to tournaments in 2016.

This story was originally published November 23, 2015 at 10:37 PM with the headline "Dustin Johnson has big plans for 2016 season, golf school at TPC Myrtle Beach."