Efren Nava was a latecomer to golf, but he took to it right away.
“I didn’t start golfing until I was in my mid- or early 20s, but I had a knack for it immediately,” he said. “I became a low handicapper.”
That led him to move from Los Angeles to Arizona in 1995 to try to become a professional golfer. And while he made money, he also had kids and “life happened.”
Nava had a limousine business, then a trucking company.
“And then I was fortunate enough, my wife was like, ‘Well, what do you want to do after the trucking company?’" he said. "I said I want to do something in golf. So that’s when I went to the Golf Academy of America.”
That put him on track to where Nava is today, owner of Advanced Dynamic Golf Center, a Gilbert shop that combines custom club-making, club fittings, repair and golf instruction.
At the Golf Academy, Nava earned an Associate of Applied Business degree and started figuring out just where he wanted fit into the golf industry.
“When we started doing golf club repair, that’s when I realized, ‘this is fun, I want to do this,’” he said.
But he also knew if he wanted to make it in golf industry, he would have to do more than club repair.
“It’s a really hard industry to be successful,” he said. “So if your niche is just lessons, unless you find the right facility for you, it’s very difficult. And if you go work for somebody and you do golf club repair, so be it. But I knew that I wanted to own my own place, so I wanted to learn everything. I was like a sponge.”
Nava earned certifications for repair and instruction and became a master fitter. He worked at PXG as a club builder but kept his sights on owning his own business.
One day, he and his son were playing basketball at their gym, and he noticed some double doors. A friend’s wife working the counter told him it was just storage. She offered to show him the space, and he saw the makings of what could be three rooms.
“It just clicked in my head, ‘wow, I could build a simulator right here, and if I put a wall here, I might be able to do a club repair here,” he said. “And I was kind of mumbling that. And she says, 'Efren, the owner rents a lot of the different rooms to the tanning booth and the guy who does the stretching or whatever.' She said, ‘you should put something, go talk to him and see what happens.’”
That’s what he did, and Nava soon opened his shop there with his wife, Michelle, and he putting in a lot of the work to get it ready. The shop moved out of the gym and across the street last year.
Nava relies a lot on technology in instruction and for fittings. In instruction, he is a proponent of bio swinging mechanics.
“The problem with instruction today is that what they’re saying may not apply to you,” he said. “So when you look at somebody who’s teaching like a cookie cutter type of lessons, all his students are taught the same way. Well, nobody swings the same way. If you look on the PGA tour, they all have different characteristics in their swing.”
Nava uses technology to determine what the best swing type would be for each golfer. The simulator used there also is used in club fittings.
Nava said while his shop can do what some of the bigger shops can do, his shop has become more of a custom place. Its reputation for the custom work has grown, too.
“I used to say we do a lot of (work for) people all over the United States,” he said. “They send their stuff in to me, I customize it and send it back. But now I have to say around the world, because we’ve been sending some stuff in some locations like Ireland, Canada, Germany. More and more people are starting to hear about us.”
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on Twitter. We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.
Tom Blodgett Senior News Editor | Gilbert @sp_blodgett
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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