VILLAGE OF PINEHURST, N.C. — “I don’t want to slow anyone down.”
“I don’t have the right equipment.”
“We don’t have anybody to teach us.”
Adam Benza has heard those responses time and time again as reasons why more people from the disabled community haven’t tried to play golf. There are clinics all over the country for adaptive golfers, but a lot are run by instructors who aren’t familiar with the community they’re teaching.
That’s why nearly ten years ago Benza enlisted the help of fellow 2023 U.S. Adaptive Open competitors Kenny Bontz, Chad Pfeifer and Kellie Valentine to create Moving Foreward, a foundation that aims to get more disabled people involved in the game through clinics and by providing equipment for those in need.
‘I was like, ‘Hey, we’re the best of every category. We’re some of the best players in United States,’” said Benza, 41, who lost his leg to Ewing’s sarcoma at 9 years old. “Let’s do this, go and teach golf professionals to make it more available so they have more knowledge on how our prosthetics work, how we swing, Kellie has one arm, they’re both (above knee amputees) and I’m a (below knee amputee).”
PHOTOS: 2023 U.S. Adaptive Open
“No golf instructors know how to really navigate what anybody out here is dealing with,” added Benza, who studied professional golf management at Penn State. “So that was kind of our main goal, to make it more accessible for all of the communities so they could go to a golf professional and know that they know what they’re talking about and how to deal with this us.”
“Adam does a lot of the day-to-day stuff,” said Pfeifer. “He does a lot of clinics, he’s helping teach other pros how to teach adaptive people, how to adjust to whatever their disability is, all the different adaptive equipment that’s out there.”
None other than 13-time PGA Tour winner Jordan Spieth, whose parents went to the same high school as Benza, was the foundation’s first donor, but Benza didn’t shy away from his disappointment that more people don’t want to donate.
“We would like to do more clinics, more for awareness, golf tournaments raising money for people to go to events like this, but people don’t understand that it’s all coming out of our own pockets,” he explained. “To be able to go to people and say, ‘You’ve never played an adaptive event, we’re gonna pay for you to go out there, we’ll get used clubs,’ stuff like that,…
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