Dear keen to build springboard for aspiring pros

Dear, who teamed up with Wallace Booth and Callum Macaulay to form the Scotland team that claimed an astonishing victory in the Eisenhower Trophy competition in 2008, looked to have a promising future when he headed for the European Tour School the following year after taking part in the Walker Cup.

He missed out narrowly on a Tour card and, after four years on the Alps Tour, the Challenge Tour and the EuroPro Tour, the Perth man has accepted that the time has come to embrace another challenge.

His new business, set up with Liam Barn, a former professional golfer who has coached Dear since he was 21, and Katy McNicoll, like Dear a graduate of Florida's Lynn University, is called Golf Scholars (golfscholars.com) and aims to link candidates for sports scholarships at American universities with the right institute.

While several agencies are already in that line of business, Dear and his colleagues are looking to do it a different way, placing greater emphasis on offering those with golfing ability the opportunity for a life-changing experience, rather than merely seeking to provide a finishing school for would-be professionals.

The longer-established agencies tend to seek out low-handicap golfers and punt them to coaches with whom they have relationships, but Golf Scholars, for a charge of £85 per year, provides an exchange through which youngsters and coaches can network directly.

Some 1200 programmes are available at American universities but the Golf Scholars team only offers contact with those they have fully vetted. To date there are close to 80 in their database, with two or three joining per week.

What few understand is that male golfers with handicaps of 5 - the handicap Paul Lawrie had when he turned professional as a teenager - and as high as 9 for females will be considered, also taking into account their academic performance.

As Dear observes, with the cost of university education in the UK rising, the prospect of getting a quality education and experiencing life in the USA for a number of years will be attractive.

His own situation could not be a better advertisement for the value of doing so. The idea behind the venture initially came to him as a result of having indirectly helped McNicoll and her brother Keir, also a Scottish international golfer, to go to Lynn. He has subsequently assisted another couple of talented Scots, Danny Young and Paul McPhee, in their trans-Atlantic planning and is currently talking to the Scottish Boys champion Bradley Neil about his future plans.

"I was over in Florida for around six weeks at the end of last year, came home at Christmas time and talked through different things with Liam and it went from there," he explained. "We work really well together. He has a lot of marketing experience and he's built a number of websites through that, so it's just worked well."

Dear deserves respect for the maturity shown by recognising when to stop chasing his losses, but in broader terms his situation reflects the on-going problem of the failure to transform amateur promise into professional success.

No Scot since Andrew Coltart, who turned professional more than 20 years ago, has emerged from the amateur ranks to represent Europe at the Ryder Cup and Dear is just the latest of hundreds of hot prospects to try since. It raises serious questions about how these players are being prepared for professional golf and Dear - for all his amateur credentials, he was offered the chance to play in just one European Tour event in four years as a professional - reckons it is at least partly down to lack of opportunity.

In saying so he makes clear, understandably given the extent of it, his gratitude for the support received from the Scottish Golf Union during his amateur career.

Speaking in the same week as the SGU sought to portray as a virtue a change of policy that effectively acknowledges that the 'one size fits all' approach it has pursued for years under its current management has not worked, Dear acknowledges that Scottish golfers are disadvantaged when it comes to making the transition to the professional ranks.

He draws comparison with the United States team comprising Rickie Fowler, Billy Horschel and Jamie Lovemark that he, Booth and Macaulay comfortably forced into second place in 2008. "It might be through my perspective but, knowing Rickie, having chatted to him quite a bit, [I know that] they got a lot of opportunities and I don't think we really did," he suggested. "A lot of people say you need to create your own opportunity but we are poor at giving guys chances to play in professional events.

"You look last week at the Dunhill: there were 25 invitations and George Murray [was the only Scot who] got one. When you go to European Tour events in Spain, those places are filled by Spanish Challenge Tour players."

As many commentators have pointed out in recent years, that is at least partly down to the lack of a confederated approach, with too many different bodies involved in running Scottish golf.

Dear recognises the problem. "We pay the price for being an old golfing country," he said. "We've had all these organisations kicking about for a long time and a great way of looking at it is if you started with a blank sheet you would just have one box at the top marked 'Federation'."

That, of course, is an argument that will run and run as the wheels of change in Scottish golf grind at their traditional pace, but, for all that his bid to become an elite professional golfer can be deemed to have been a failure, Dear's story is one that offers hope to all those who want to give it a try but ensure that they have options.