How Tony Ruggiero Uses Onform to Remotely Coach Students and Instructors

I’ve been a golf instructor for nearly three decades. In the early days, if you wanted to work with me, you had to be standing on the same patch of grass or within the same bay at a training facility. 

If I traveled to see my Tour players and top amateurs, I would bring a bunch of equipment and gear, and the travel costs involved added up quickly. 

Today, my business, Dewsweepers Golf, has a presence across the southeast United States as well as places like Philadelphia and Long Island.

People often ask how I manage a team spread across the east coast while coaching players who are competing on the Asian Tour in places like India. 

For us, Onform is the platform that allows Desweepers instructors to coach — both onsite and remotely — and allows me to offer quality control across the business, ensuring our coaches are learning and progressing as well. 

The End of Local-Only Coaching

Instruction has changed. It used to be that you found someone at your local club and that was your guy. 

Now, with social media and YouTube, students look for a style, a certain personality, or a specific methodology. They might see my content and say, “I want Tony to oversee my game,” but they live in a different time zone.

With Onform, distance is irrelevant. I can send a student a link, they upload their video, and I’m looking at it before I have my morning cup of coffee or before I board my next flight. 

It’s cloud-based, which is a lifesaver. I don’t go through an iPad every two months because the storage is full. Everything is just there, well-organized, and easily filtered to each student. 

It’s versatile, portable, and it allows me to stay connected to my staff and my players regardless of where in the world I am.

For guys like Andy Ogletree playing overseas, it’s far superior to something like WhatsApp. On WhatsApp, you’re downloading files to your camera roll, you can’t draw on the screen easily, and you lose the history. 

Onform keeps the records and archives it, like you would have a file at your doctor’s office. 

When a player is struggling, I don’t just look at what’s wrong today. I pull up their file and look at the same swing from a year ago to see what they looked like when they were executing flawlessly.

“If you’re a coach and you aren’t using a cloud-based system to manage your students, you aren’t just working harder — you’re providing a lower level of service. It’s time to run the business like a business.”

Quality Control: The ‘Costco’ Approach to Golf Instruction

I recently read about why people choose Costco over Sam’s Club. Costco cares about training. They care that their employees do things the right way. 

In our industry, we need to treat golf instruction like a high-level business.

As the Director of Instruction at Dewsweepers Golf, I’m responsible for the quality of every lesson that goes out under our name. I don’t want a young instructor going on some crazy tangent they saw on Instagram or YouTube.

Using Onform, I’m able to offer coaching and mentorship to my instructors. From my home in Mobile, Alabama, or even if I’m traveling, I can use the platform to offer: 

• Oversight: I can jump into the app and see what a junior instructor is telling a student.
• Safety Net: If a student isn’t getting better after six lessons, I can review the video history and see where the disconnect is.
• Tiered Coaching: We can offer packages where a junior instructor handles the recurring lessons, but I “peek in” once a month to ensure we’re on track. It makes elite coaching accessible and keeps the branding consistent.

Mentorship in the Digital Age: A Case Study

One of our younger coaches, Connor Luke, is incredibly passionate, but early on, he was like a fire hydrant. He’d try to tell a student everything he knew about the golf swing in 12 minutes.We used Onform to bridge that gap. Connor shares his lessons with me weekly. I’ll look at a swing and say, “Connor, the grip is fine, but look at the ball position. Fix that first.”

It keeps him within his knowledge base and gives the student the confidence that they have a second pair of eyes on their game.

Being a smart young teacher doesn’t mean you have all the answers. It means you’re smart enough to ask someone who has seen the movie before.

I know this all too well, because I continue to learn every day from mentors who have shaped who I am today as a golf instructor. 

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