Kevin Corn has taught thousands of people how to play golf and refine their game. Sometimes, he has to get creative. Like the time a young patient at Ranken Jordan Pediatric Bridge Hospital in Maryland Heights wanted to learn the sport. The boy’s hands were severely burned and his fingers were gone. Merely holding a club seemed impossible. But the boy was adamant: He not only wanted to play, he wanted to do everything on his own.
“It took a lot of straps, a lot of wraps, and anything else we could get our hands on,” Corn says. “But, you know what? We figured it out for him, and he hit golf balls every week for an hour at a time.”
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Fourteen years ago, Corn launched the junior golf program at the hospital, introducing scores of young patients to the sport. But Corn, a PGA pro and director of golf at Innsbrook Resort, isn’t merely trying to grow the game. He’s delivering smiles and much-needed distractions to kids navigating traumatic and life-changing medical situations one swing at a time.
“It’s not about anything more than that,” Corn says. “My main focus has been to make kids dealing with very tough situations feel like kids again, show them that they can do things, and give them an outlet—or just a fun time.”
Nearly every Wednesday since May 10, 2011, Corn has devoted his time to the kids at Ranken Jordan. Even during the pandemic, Corn stayed connected with patients through Zoom, helping them learn remotely, as best he could, how to swing clubs.
This past week, Ranken Jordan returned the favor. The 60-bed hospital renamed its junior golf program the Kevin Corn Golf Academy, inspired by a donation from Virginia McDowell and Michael Wendorf of the McDowell Family Foundation.
“Kevin brings an opportunity for our kids—especially our older kids—to have normalcy,” says Kristin LaRose, chief nursing officer at Ranken Jordan. “These children have gone through some sort of traumatic event and their lives have been turned upside down. For so many of them and their families, they begin to wonder: Will we have moments of normalcy again? Will we play sports? Will we be able to participate in the normal things that kids do? Kevin makes it possible.”
The idea came to Corn early in 2011. After reading about a golf program for kids in the Dallas–Forth Worth area, Corn wanted to lead a similar initiative for young hospital patients in the St. Louis region. At the moment of his epiphany, Corn says he had no clue how to launch or oversee such a program, but the work felt important enough that he wanted to try. Leadership at Ranken Jordan was immediately interested.
“From early February 2011 to our first clinic on May 10, it was a fairly short period of time to get something like this up and running,” Corn says. “But that’s how much they bought into it from the get-go.”
Instruction takes place both on outdoor courses and in improvised settings at the hospital, which also features a couple of small putting areas. Corn playfully refers to those indoor greens as Ranken Jordan National Golf Links. And though he may miss a week or two worth of clinics each year, it’s never hard to find a substitute teacher.
“What started out as just Kevin coming and connecting with our kids has spread out into his personal community that’s just kind of magical,” LaRose says. “It makes me think about the power of one person doing the right thing.”
Corn credits “a lot of really great friends” for donating not only their time and expertise for instruction, but also sharing equipment and funding to make it all work. More than 2,000 kids have participated in the program, each leaving a mark on its founder
“These are kids who have every right to be mad at the world, and then you see them smiling, laughing, being happy and being kids,” Corn says. “That’s been the whole goal from Day 1—to make kids smile.”
