"One Of America's Top 10 Greatest Teachers."
- Golf Digest
Mike Bender Golf Academy
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Lake Mary, FL, July 7, 2009 – The golf industry's most exclusive list of top teaching talent has been issued today by Golf Digest Magazine as it unveils its biennial list of America's 50 Greatest Teachers for 2009-10 in its August issue. Among those named to the new list is Mike Bender, owner of The Mike Bender Golf Academy headquartered at Timacuan G.C. in Lake Mary, FL. Bender has been on the Golf Digest list since its inception in 2000 and has steadily climbed from No. 37 to his new ranking at No. 9.
Joining Bender on Golf Digest’s Best Teachers in Your State list are Mike Bender Golf Academy Director of Instruction, Cheryl Anderson at No. 32. Bender is No. 3 in the Florida rankings out of the thousands of golf instructors who call the state home.
"This is a special honor because it means your peers respect your work as a teacher," said Bender. "I've been a competitor and teacher for nearly four decades and I can say that being considered among the top 10 teachers by the industry means as much to me as anything else I've accomplished in the game. I love to teach and I’m very excited about where the academy is headed and the extremely positive results we’ve seen with our students."
As Bender has achieved worldwide recognition as a teacher who gets students to make significant improvement in their games, golf’s top players have sought out his advice. Zach Johnson, 2007 Masters Champion and six-time winner on the PGA Tour, has trained with Mike since Johnson was launching his professional career on the mini-tours at the beginning of the decade. LPGA four-time tournament winner Seon Hwa Lee and rookie sensation Vicki Hurst also have been working with Mike for years. More recently, PGA Tour veterans, including Jonathan Byrd, Mark Hensby, Robert Damron and two-time U.S. Open champion Lee Janzen, have put their faith in Mike. All told, Bender has helped more than two-dozen PGA, Champions and LPGA Tour professionals with their games.
Many of these professionals have a high comfort level with Mike because they know he has been in their shoes. Bender was a three-time NCAA All-American (1978-1980) and two-time NCAA Division III individual champion (1979-1980) before spending three seasons on the PGA Tour from 1987-89. He began teaching after leaving the Tour and has been at Timacuan since 1991. Recently he opened satellite academies at Stoneybrook East and Stoneybrook West in metropolitan Orlando along with Mike Bender Elite Golf Academies at Sarabande CC in Howey-in-the-Hills, FL and in Seoul, South Korea. These Elite Golf Academies are for competitive junior, collegiate and young professional players who want a world-class, full-time training program that used Bender’s proven techniques for building champion golfers.
Bender is also well known for his creation of the MEGSA Perfect Practice Equipment, a revolutionary training station that is used by thousands of amateurs and top professionals including 2007 major winners Johnson and Morgan Pressel.
Since the first survey in 2000, Golf Digest has used peer voting on the state and national level to build the Best Teacher lists. This year's list was selected by more than 1,000 teachers from all 50 states who filled out an online ballot. There are more than 30,000 golf professionals in the United States who were eligible for consideration.
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