CAREY G. MUMFORD
PROFESSIONAL SKETCH
What does one do after a forty year tour of duty in hospital chaplaincy? Take the same skills and energy to a new arena - helping with the development of the knowledge and skill of those who manage, teach and play the game of golf.
Just prior to exclusive focus on golf, he spent five years developing human resources, especially management and sales, for a major Sunbelt resort/recreation developer. That often led to his being sought out by golf professionals, club managers and others associated with the game for help with understanding human behavior and the skills of self-management and stress reduction.
The full shift to golf began with an invitation from the PGA of America to serve on the faculty of their Advanced Business School. In addition, he continues to conduct playing and teaching clinics and workshops across the country and in Canada, and regularly coaches amateur and professional players, assisting them with the mental skills that influence building and playing the game.
Corporate groups, with their systems and human resource needs, remain among his clients.
With PGA Professional 
Larry Shute of Crossville, TN, he created
KeyGolf. Located in Crossville, TN the mission is dedicated to
learning, teaching and playing in the context of balance in the
mental and physical aspects of the game. KeyGolf combines the
principles and processes required both by sports (golf, in
particular) and management behaviors and practices. Shute is a
PGA Life member and Master professional.
Carey is also Director of Game Enhancement for The Bird Golf Academy, headquarted in Denver.
His list of involvments also includes mental game coaching in PGA Junior schools in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, California and Montana and college golf programs at Eastern Kentucky, Tennessee Tech, Brevard Community College, West Point, Louisville, Vanderbilt and Miami. He has made himself available to a number of individual coaches and players from other schools, as well.
In their special issue on the mental game in 1990, Golf Magazine placed him among the top dozen golf psychologists in the country, and Golf World Magazine devoted two pages to his second book, "The Double Connexion," in the Pro-Report section of their June 19, 1992 issue.
His work is extensively used in books by Michael Hebron ("The Art and Zen of Learning Golf") and Phil Ritson ("Golf Your Way"), both of whom are listed among the top 100 golf teachers in the country. His work is referenced in John Andrisani's book "Think Like Tiger," and is the content of the fourth tape in the Ritson series called "The Encyclopedia of Golf," as well as the core of mental game teaching at all of the Phil Ritson/Mel Sole Golf Schools around the country.
His unique approach to the mental game has earned wide acceptance among both US and Canadian PGA golf professionals, largely because it goes beyond "what" ought to happen and implements the process that teaches "how" it is actually carried out. By integrating principles of behavior, psychology and physiology, and removing unnecessary complications, he gives the teacher and player "user-friendly" resources to reshape widely held, though misleading, notions that have caused many players to "shoot themselves in the foot."
His two books, GOLF'S BEST KEPT SECRET and THE DOUBLE CONNEXION, describe the context of "playing the game within yourself" and the natural principles and processes essential to the balance and integration of mental and manual skills. He shows how players can move naturally from the practice tee to the golf course. The applications, which fit both work and play, form the cross-currents of common denominators stimulated both books. Additionally, he applies these skills to family life enrichment for golf professionals, training and developing pro-shop staff, training golf course marshals, and workshops for coaches and professional instructors.
Carey Mumford is a graduate of Wake Forest University and Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. His strong training and counseling background, balanced and supported by his thorough familiarity with physiological principles, have allowed him to understand the mutual effect of mind-on-body and body-on-mind that touches everything we do, and to integrate the basic principles into an orderly process for learning, teaching and playing the game. The same is true of his approach to management development and training.
Over the past fifteen years, he has faced more than 22,000 of the Class A Member Professionals of the PGA, conducted in excess of 200 clinics for amateurs and professionals in 30 states and Canada, and worked individually with more than 100 players on the PGA, LPGA, Seniors, Nike, TC Jordan, Hooters, Futures, and Mini Tours.
He lives with his wife, Janice, an RN, in Crossville, TN, on the Cumberland Plateau, in the area popularly referred to as the Golfing Capital of Tennessee. He and Janice have three sons and three grandsons.
His oldest son is a Golf Professional in Charleston, SC and his youngest was Captain of the golf team at the United States Military Academy at West Point.