Jake Hutt is Blending Catchy Music and Coaching to Help Golfers Play Better

“Do the arm wrestle in the downswing, yo! So you can get… shallow”

A hip-hop beat and a long-haired, bearded, backwards-hat wearing guy on a screen is giving you a golf tip. A golf tip unlike any you’ve ever heard or seen.

But Jake Hutt makes it work.

Nearly 500,000 followers on Instagram and inching closer to 200,000 on YouTube, the PGA of America Golf Professional of more than five years has taken a unique approach to sharing his love of the game with folks of all ages and all abilities. Yes, his social media feed is littered with tips – rhymed and rapped.

“I’ve made music my whole life,” Hutt says, “and golf has given me something to write about.”

Hutt’s first concert was Bob Dylan with his dad. He remembers his first album being the self-titled effort from the alt-rock band Sublime. And then there was one of The Beastie Boys’ first records which he loved – and remembers hiding from his parents.

A hockey star growing up, Hutt went to Salve Regina University in Rhode Island on a scholarship and through the summer months, while in school, he and some teammates worked at Newport National. The head pro there, Andy Farrea, was an inspiration to Hutt. Players on the Boston Bruins would come down to play and there was a “world of golf” that Hutt had never seen before – and he fell in love with it.

After school finished, Hutt was part of an athletes-to-business program where he applied for countless sales jobs. None made sense. He wanted to do something different.

“With golf,” Hutt says, “I just loved every second.”

Hutt got a degree in psychology – his dad is a psychologist with his own practice – but there was never really an intent to do anything with it. It’s still something he found fascinating and when pressed, he admitted that while there’s not much of a line between golf and psychology at first blush, maybe there is after all.

“I do love talking to people. I do love helping people. So, who knows,” Hutt adds. “Some people are just (at a golf lesson) to talk and chat and people just don’t have a lot of other interactions with people during their days. If that’s the one conversation they had in a day – it’s definitely special to be able to connect with people on that level.”

Hutt began his golf career in outside services at Stanford Golf Course, started teaching, and quickly began working on becoming a PGA of America Member. To this day, despite the social media fame, he still finds time to teach three days per week. The music-making wasn’t something he instantly began doing with his posts, but installing that kind of creativity into his day-to-day was inevitable.

“Where does my brain fit in this world? Where do I fit? The creative stuff, the music, and now the video editing is just an obsession,” Hutt says. “It’s really cool to be able to blend all this and get better at golf and the literature around golf and the golf swing and package that in my own words and try to give it to the world.”

One big thing that Hutt’s began to give the world over the last few years, specifically, is the launch of the Dryvebox – a leading innovator in golf simulator technology. Hutt and Adeel Yang are the co-founders. Dryvebox has continued to thrive, in part, thanks to the support of EP Golf Ventures, an investment fund the PGA of America is a part of.

Hutt does his three-day-a-week teachings out of a Dryvebox unit – two days in Palo Alto and one day in San Francisco. Yang just got into golf when the COVID-19 pandemic hit initially and there was maybe one indoor spot in San Francisco for him to practice. It wasn’t the greatest, Hutt said, and Yang went out on his own to build up a trailer with a simulator. It was, at first, extremely rudimentary. But Yang is a serial entrepreneur, had just sold his second business, and the mobile golf unit became another solid business idea.

Yang took a lesson from Hutt one day and they, quickly, got to talking.

“There was just great energy. It was an awesome lesson. About halfway through he asked if I minded if he pitched me on an idea he had,” Hutt said. “You never know who is full of s—t and who isn’t. But this sounded incredible.”

Hutt said at first bookings just took place via his teaching website. They would drive the trailer to someone’s house, give a lesson, and drive it to the next persons’ house. There were pool noodles and wires everywhere – but it was a blast, Hutt said. Now they have more than two dozen units and plenty of key partnerships, including with the Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy-founded TGL. Dryvebox is the official mobile golf simulator partner of the indoor simulator league set to launch in January.

That’s just one part of Hutt’s ever-growing empire of interests. At the heart of it all is just a guy who’s having a ton of fun teaching people about golf in a unique way.

“I had a client send me a video of his three-year-old watching one of my videos and dancing along with it, moving with it. There’s no intent but I want everyone to enjoy it, laugh with it, and if you can learn something, ultimately that’s the goal,” Hutt says about his content. “If I had a zillion dollars, I’d still be doing the same things I’m doing now.”