Young SA golf prodigy David Cooper excited for LIV Golf Adelaide
Golf every day, rowing machines, medicine balls and constant interstate travel – it’s all in a day’s work for this eight-year old wunderkind, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
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David Cooper steadies himself over the ball before taking a quick look up the driving range.
He returns his gaze to the ball, raises the head of his driver for half a second before letting it settle, momentarily, behind the tee.
With the minimum of fuss, he lifts the club in a perfect arc behind his head and then reverses the momentum. As he swings down, his weight shifts forward, his hips pivot and he strikes.
Whack! Contact is perfect.
The ball sails straight down the manicured range. His head stays still on contact and his follow-through is picture perfect.
He looks back, satisfied.
“How did that one feel, David?” I ask.
“Really good – that was a good one,” he replies, grinning.
And so he should. We’re in his happy place. On a golf course. And he’s nailed the shot. The ball has sailed about 180m down the driving range.
Sure, most professional golfers consistently drive about 100m further, but David is not yet a pro. In fact, David is not yet even in high school. He’s only eight years old.
David plays golf every day. He gets up at 6am so he can squeeze in nine holes or a session at the driving range before school at St Peter’s College. He’s a member at Kooyonga Golf Club and plays there most weekends, but he’s equally at home at courses at North Adelaide, Grange, Flagstaff Hill and even Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island, where his parents have a holiday home.
(Needless to say, he can’t wait until the new $30m Cliffs course opens on KI later this year.)
He has a personal trainer who guides him through a golf-specific exercise program (on the advice of a Grange golf club physiotherapist) that includes rowing, medicine balls, Russian twists, sit ups and push ups.
He has a coach in Adelaide but his primary mentor is based in Melbourne, where David and his family last year spent more weekends than they care to remember as he competed in US Kids Golf events – mostly on the Mornington Peninsula.
David won Melbourne’s US Kids Golf winter series for his age last year – a series that involved him and the family flying or driving to the Victorian capital every weekend for six weeks.
He also qualified for and played in a tournament in the US last year, at Gold Mountain Golf Course near Seattle. His goal this year is to qualify for the US Kids Golf World Championship in Pinehurst, North Carolina.
Oh, he also has his own Instagram account peppered with reels and reels of video carefully curated by mother Yulia for his more than 2000 followers. His Instagram handle is, of course, @golf_david and it goes without saying that he dreams of becoming a professional golfer.
“I like it because when I hit the ball it feels good, and most of the time I hit good shots,” he says simply when I ask him what he likes about golf. We’re chatting at The Grange Golf Club, home of LIV Golf Adelaide, an annual phenomenon that promoters tout as being the loudest event in a global competition reshaping a sport long considered staid and conservative.
Last year, the tournament injected more than $120m to the South Australian economy, attracted 94,000 fans and was named the best event on the planet for the second year running at World Golf Awards.
This year, for its third instalment, the event is shifting from April to February and it can’t come soon enough for David, who will be here for all three days – just like he and his family have been both previous years.
David’s golfing journey started when he was just three years old when he accompanied dad Nick Cooper on a few corporate golf days.
Cooper, now 56, had never really been a golfer (he grew up playing football and cricket) but when David said he wanted to play, he and wife Yulia Petrenko, 36, bought their eldest a set of clubs for his fourth birthday.
The couple, partners at Adelaide-based chartered accountant company Oracle Insolvency Services, were at their holiday home in Penneshaw when David started hitting balls for the first time in the backyard.
“I was doing something in the kitchen and then I could hear a banging sound, and I looked out and he was reaching the back fence with it – he was hitting it further and further,” Petrenko says. She was not a golfer either – tennis was more her schtick – but she and Cooper saw the joy that golf brought David and their life is now consumed by the sport. David’s younger sister Samantha, six, also plays and youngest sister Morgan, four, will soon follow.
Petrenko and Cooper say they are too scared to think about how much money they have spent on the sport in the past few years. But the return on their investment is watching their kids enjoy themselves – away from screens – and make new friends. They say David is a different kid when he’s on the golf course and marvel at his maturity and focus with club in hand.
“We’re not forcing him – this is all about David’s initiative,” Petrenko says.
“If he wants to play golf, we’ll take him to play golf but we never say ‘okay, pick up your clubs and go out and play’.
“That’s not how it works. The initiative always needs to come from him but we’ll give him every opportunity.
“Some days he will just say ‘I want to chill, I want to take a break’ and that’s fine. But then, he finds himself the next day going ‘yep, I need to go, need to get out and play’.”
LIV Golf’s marquee player Cameron Smith is David’s favourite. He met him here at Grange last year. He also met Marc Leishman. And a host of other pros from all four corners of the globe he one day hopes to emulate.
Petrenko and Cooper are keen to extol the virtues for families of LIV Golf Adelaide, where youngsters have a chance to meet and learn from their heroes and enjoy a host of activities in the fan zone.
The event has sparked a national golfing boom. According to Golf Australia, membership at Australian golf clubs increased by 5.6 per cent last year. In South Australia, that figure grew by a whopping 19.2 per cent.
Junior membership across the nation has risen by 33.4 per cent in the past five years and an estimated 3.8 million people played the sport in 2023-24 – a nine per cent, year-on-year increase.
David’s Victorian-based coach Sean Kischenberg, US Kids Golf Melbourne tour director, says the LIV Adelaide event has helped attract a new audience and that clubs are also increasingly opening their doors to younger players.
“Five or six years ago it was pretty hard to get kids on really good premium golf courses,” Kischenberg says.
“I really feel like the clubs are going ‘no, no, this is really important’. They’re also understanding that women – and this is part of probably the whole diversity of the game – that women and kids are an important role in the sustainability of the game.”
Kischenberg is helping Yulia Petrenko bring the US Kids Golf back to Adelaide for the first time since before Covid. The first event will be at West Lakes on February 23. The organisation says it has a focus on fun, friends and family. Tee positions on each hole are determined by age groups (ranging from six and under to 15s-18s), so that players of all sizes can still aim for a par.
Kischenberg says David Cooper has one of the best long games he has seen for a boy his age. David’s chipping and pitching is also strong, his coach says, but there is room for improvement on his putting.
“From a coaching perspective, separate from that, I like to see kids develop as little people,” he says. “It’s not just about winning, it’s about creating friendships and creating good memories. You don’t get too many lucky breaks in golf, but one thing I love about golf for young kids is it teaches them a lot of life skills.
“And David is really learning about patience and perseverance and respect for himself and other competitors. It’s not just about golf, it’s about developing kids in general.” â–
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