Emile Steinmann is KZN golf coach of the year
Noted as a short game guru, Steinmann has coached everyone from first timers to tour professionals, including Louis Albertse and James du Preez with whom he still works.
Ballito’s Emile Steinmann is the KwaZulu-Natal golf coach of the year and is also in the running for the national award.
Steinmann won the award, which is voted for by fellow golfing professionals, for the first time last week and joins four other regional award winners in the national race.
He has been coaching since 2005, moving to Ballito in May last year to take up a role with the newly founded McKenna Performance Academy at Umhlali Country Club.
A promising school golfer growing up at Pretoria’s Irene Country Club, Steinmann was forced to look at other careers in golf for the first time after being involved in a serious car accident which kept him off the course for almost a year in 2003.
“I had pretty much played golf my whole life so it was a big turning point for me. I decided that rather than doing nothing, I could get involved in the industry and worked in the Swartkop Country Club Pro Shop,” said Steinmann.
After his father passed away in 2005, Steinmann decided he needed to get a qualification and did his Professional Golfer’s Association (PGA) apprenticeship under Kevin Stone at Centurion Country Club.
Once qualified, he worked at Gardener Ross (now the Els Club at Copperleaf), before joining the University of Pretoria High Performance Academy in 2011.
While at Tuks, he took two teams to the World University Championships in Czechia in 2012 and France in 2015, before coaching the South African team at the World Student Games in Taiwan in 2017, which he cites as one of the highlights of his career.
“The student games is the second biggest sporting event by participation after the Olympics and it was an incredible experience in Taipei, with over 7 000 athletes in a mini-Olympic village,” he said.
He briefly returned to Irene CC in 2021 before joining McKenna the following year, where he is the current head coach.
Noted as a short game guru, Steinmann has coached everyone from first timers to tour professionals, including Louis Albertse and James du Preez with whom he still works.
Although he is modest about the quality of his own golf game, “It’s shocking or champagne nowadays,” Steinmann is also the reigning PGA KZN Regional champion, a title he shared with Thomas Raatgever.
He is available for private coaching and can be reached through McKenna Performance Academy.
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