◤ Bay 03 · Method
The other two bays run on data we measured. This one runs on data the PGA of America publishes about its own professionals — so the job here is to route you to it honestly, not to re-score it.
A city, a ZIP, or a geolocation fix becomes a latitude and longitude against a baked table of 42,000 ZIP centroids and 30,000 city centroids. No third-party geocoder sits in the path, so nothing about where you are leaves the server.
That point goes to the PGA of America's public coach service with your radius. What comes back — bios, offerings, prices, open lesson times — is what the PGA is serving at that moment, not a copy we took last month.
Price ceiling, lesson type, session length, prepayment, and how soon someone can actually see you — all applied in the browser over the result set. Only a new location or radius costs another round-trip.
The PGA service answers one question: who teaches near this point? That's the right question once you've searched, but it leaves the map empty before you have. So we swept 230 metro areas once — every state, plus the golf destinations a population list would miss — and kept 1,239 unique coaches across 50 states as the map's base layer. That sweep was last run on July 24, 2026.
Those baked pins carry only what a pin needs: a name, a city, a price floor, whether a calendar exists. The moment you hover one, the app fetches that coach live, which is why the overlay takes a beat to fill in and why what it shows is current. Search anywhere and the live results replace the base layer entirely.
The map itself is plain SVG on an Albers USA projection — no tile server, no map library, no requests to anyone else. The dashed ring around your search point is a true geodesic circle, projected point by point, because a plain circle would be the wrong size everywhere except the latitude it was drawn for.
The PGA directory publishes no star ratings, and we don't collect them from visitors. Putting a fabricated 4.7 next to a named professional would be a claim about a real person's livelihood, so the only rating in this app is the one you give a coach yourself — stored in your browser, never uploaded, never aggregated, and labelled as yours everywhere it appears.
What we do surface instead are facts the directory actually states: whether someone is a full PGA Member or an Associate working toward certification, how many offerings they run, their real price range, and whether they publish a bookable calendar at all.
Booking happens on the PGA's own site. Pick a time here and it opens their scheduling page — ForeFitter never takes your name, your email, or your card.