Scott Mayer knew exactly what he wanted to do with the rest of his life when he graduated from Rockland High School in 1986.

Mayer, a golf-obsessed teen at the time, spent his summers playing as many as 54 holes a day at the three courses in the area – Goose River, Rockland and Samoset. During the school year, he helped lead the Fighting Tigers to three straight state championships.

The kid was focused.

Instead of pursuing a playing career, though, Mayer enrolled in the PGA-sanctioned Professional Golf Management program at Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, Mich. He learned the basics – pro shop management, club and cart repair, turf maintenance – but Mayer paid particularly close attention to the world-renowned teaching pros who shared their knowledge on campus. His focus narrowed, and he absorbed as much as his brain would allow. Mayer passed up the opportunity to play college golf so he could concentrate on learning more about the game through multiple six-month internships at courses in Florida.

That brings us to the present. After stops at Purpoodock, Bethel Inn and Country Club, Riverside and Rockland, Mayer has landed at Nonesuch River, where he is the director of golf instruction.

“I think I’ve found a home here at Nonesuch. The facility is great. (It’s) super for instruction, in terms of being able to take students out on the course,” says Mayer. “And the people are great.”

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Mayer has always been about the people, which explains how and why he adapted ideas from many different teaching pros and sports psychologists to develop his unique, personalized teaching style.

“A lot of golf instruction is done where the golf professional looks at the individual and they compare their swing to a model swing they have in their head, and they tell the individual where their swing is broken in relationship to the model,” says Mayer, who was named the 2004 State of Maine Golf Teacher of the Year. “I believe that everybody’s an individual and we all have our own dynamic swing, and I try to teach a philosophy of the game.

“I believe that if you teach the individual how to play the game their swing will start to develop in a manner so that they can play the game. So, it’s a little backwards, but it’s been what’s made me so successful as a teacher, I think.”

Dana Gordon agrees. He started working with Mayer last spring and was so impressed with the results that he came back for more this year.

“You see the results. You don’t learn the swing overnight, but he’s very good at communicating,” Gordon says. “If one thing doesn’t work he’ll move on and find something that works for you.”

Jim Fairbanks, the head golf pro at Nonesuch, is another one of Mayer’s pupils. He says he played the best golf of his life for a one-month stretch last summer after working with Mayer.

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“If you watch a kid play golf, they don’t think, ‘How?’ ” says Fairbanks. “You tell them to do something and they just do it, then BAM! It just happens cause they’re not thinking, ‘How?’

“And that’s really what Scott, I think in many ways, is getting at: You’ve got to get out of the way to let yourself do it.”

As the demand for his services has grown, Mayer has branched out. He has written two instructional booklets – “A Golfing Philosophy to Play A-Round With” and “Golf as a Concept” – and also produced an instructional video, “Fundamentals of the Mind.” Mayer also is working with the local Fox affiliate to develop a half-hour program on Maine golf, and this season he started the Mayer School of Golf.

“You can come with two or three people, your friends. And you can dictate what it is that you want to work on,” he says. “I’ve worked at some six to eight different golf schools over the years for many years and that’s been my forte.

“Anybody can become a better golfer if you focus just on the swing. Not everyone can mechanically or physically apply the principles to hit better golf shots, but if they have an idea of how the game works and why it works the way it does they can apply that within their own ability and improve.”

Note to readers:

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With all of this information flooding my brain, I have convinced my editors to let me – a 16 handicapper seeking some consistency – embark on a summer-long crusade to test Mayer’s many theories.

Mayer and I have begun by identifying some of my major flaws, which, ideally, will be the same types of things that most mid-level handicappers suffer from (slices, distance control, accuracy, chunky long irons, etc.) Now we’ll try to fix the things that are prohibiting me from shooting in the low to mid 80s on a consistent basis. To do so, Mayer has given me some exercises to work on. After I put these exercises to practice, I will explain them in print and report to you, the readers, how effective they have been for me, Joe Averagegolfer.

The idea is that these tips will mean more coming from me than from the golf pros in the various golf magazines because I have a lot more room to improve. And, hopefully, as a result you’ll be inspired enough to see if they work for you.

Along the way, of course, it would be nice if my handicap dropped by, say, 8 to 10 strokes. We’ll leave that up to Mayer, though.