Texarkana native Jonathan Buchanan played his first golf tournament in the summer following the seventh grade. By the age of 14, he knew he wanted to become a professional golfer.
After graduating from St. Edward’s University in Austin, where he was on the school’s golf team, Buchanan played in the Gateway Tour and Adams Pro Tour before suffering a knee injury. That led him to Miami, where he studied and worked with renowned golf instructor Jim McLean and discovered a passion for teaching.
Lauded as one of the best young instructors in America for the past five years by Golf Digest, Buchanan’s love for the sport and passion for making it more accessible led him to open City Golf Club at The Crescent in Dallas’ Uptown. The idea first came to him after seeing the closure of driving ranges in Uptown and near Children’s Medical Center.
“If you’re not a member at a club anywhere, there is really nowhere to go [in urban Dallas] that is convenient,” Buchanan says.
“I wanted to provide a platform for everyone to get what the professional golfer gets on a daily basis.”
Jonathan Buchanan
Open to both members and non-members, the club has grown organically through word of mouth. Its success now has the entrepreneur looking to expand to a second location in Dallas later this year. His ultimate goal is to see the business go national, so players can access clubs at home and on the road.
Memberships at City Golf Club range from $99 per month to $4,000 a year. Lessons go for $200 an hour.
Buchanan, who’s also a teaching pro at Dallas Country Club, says he wants to help players at all levels see how good they can get.
“I wanted to provide access to technology, teaching, and fitness under one roof,” he says. “I wanted to provide a platform for everyone to get what the professional golfer gets on a daily basis.”
City Golf Club offers state-of-the-art technology, such as TrackMan, to help golfers think about form and practice technique. It also has a proprietary virtual lesson platform where someone can come in, hit six shots with a seven iron, and get ranked as either beginner, intermediate, or advanced, which helps guide players through how to practice.
“People think that just hitting balls will make them better, but feedback is what is needed,” Buchanan says. “At the end of the day, you either play bad and want to come back and improve. Or you play well, and you want to continue to do that. It’s that never-ending chase.”
