Nicole Winstead, above with her sons Ransom Bryant and Chase Bryant, was introduced to golf by her father.

Terrell Bennett and his mother, Stephanie, had just pulled up for his weekly golf lesson hosted by Full Swing Golf Academy and were unloading the 15-year-old’s clubs when a group of regulars passed by with a quizzical look.

“What are you doing out here?” Stephanie says the golfers asked. “And we said, ‘He has come to play golf.’ And they were like ‘What? Really?’”

In this age of multiculturalism — not to mention the global success of Tiger Woods and other pro golfers of color— this kind of encounter might seem noteworthy only for its oddity. But golf’s reputation as an elitist, exclusive game is stubborn. In many places, the economic and cultural barriers between the game and kids like Terrell, who is black, are still steep. The same goes for Latino, Native American and physically challenged children.

That’s where Nicole Winstead comes in. The 49-year-old state employee and mother to Chase, 21, and Ransom, 13, carries two attributes of a golf outsider: She is female and black, but she also has a particular calling for “diversifying golf, one swing at a time.”

“My end goal for any of this is just to push golf in a direction so that the door is wide open versus cracked for minorities, the disabled and women,” she says. “I don’t want us to be an afterthought anymore; I want us to be a core thought just like men are. And my goal is to scream the loudest, yell the loudest, write the most controversial blog pieces that I can and let the kids have as much fun and expose them to as much as I possibly can.”

Full Swing Academy, represented at left by Charlie Simpson IV and on the right by Xavier Walker, has a motto: “Diversifying golf, one swing at a time.”

Winstead founded Full Swing Academy in Little Rock five years ago, but her love affair with the sport goes back more than four decades. Her father, Dr. Arthur Winstead III, introduced her to the game.

“I started playing when I was really little; when I was 4 my father started teaching me,” she says. “My father taught both of my boys to play golf. We’re pretty much a golfing family.”

The academy grew out of equal parts of this shared love of the game and the crushing heartbreak that came with Dr. Winstead’s death: “How this got started was sitting on a bed at my cousin’s house getting ready to bury my father, and that’s just the honest truth of it,” Nicole says steadily. “I told my oldest son that I wanted to do something to honor my father and to stay close to him. I said, ‘I think I want to start a golf clinic. Daddy wanted to do this, why don’t we just carry it along.’”

Winstead wasn’t interested in teaching just anybody; she wanted to devote her time and energy to people who wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to learn the game. At first, that meant volunteering to head an after-school club one day a week at Little Rock Preparatory Academy, for which she landed a grant to buy clubs for the 40 participants who showed up the first year. As overwhelming as that immediate interest was, it soon became apparent that she was barely scratching the surface.

“The golf course is a great place for learning lessons of mistakes and forgiveness and integrity, the whole nine yards. But as time went on and this mustard seed got bigger, I started to examine golf a little bit more. I noticed that things were not so inclusive,” she says. “It was not just with children but with women and with the disabled, the door was just cracked slightly open instead of wide open.

“The mission of Full Swing is much larger than just children; now it’s for anyone who’s underserved and underrepresented and that can be the disabled, women, children, whoever.”

Through Full Swing Academy, Nicole Winstead has passed on her love for the game to children like Breitling Jordan, above.

Stephanie Bennett heard about the program from a co-worker and thought it would be a good activity for her middle son, Terrell. At 6-foot-3 and lanky, Terrell looks every inch a basketball player, except for one thing.

“Basketball isn’t what he loved to do,” she says. “But golf, he loves to do it.”

So much so, in fact, that Terrell will practice every chance he gets; in the front yard, rolling putts down the hardwood floors in the house, even chipping in his grandmother’s yard, a habit that paid an unexpected dividend when a neighbor handed him a full set of golf clubs out of the blue, simply in recognition of the youth’s initiative to try something different.

“I’m actually a deep thinker,” Terrell says. “I like to sit in my room and write. Thinking itself to me is like escaping all the world’s troubles. Golf requires patience and mental aggressiveness, and that’s something that I feel like I can do. I’ve been one of those children that likes to be alone in peace and silence and sit in a room at a desk and draw. I’m an artist too, and quietness and patience is what drives me to do better.

“It’s taught me that in all situations that you might encounter or acquire, you should stop, breathe and think. You should never rush anything is what I learned from playing golf.”

Full Swing Academy golfer Drew Willis enjoys a moment on the green.

Winstead teaches with volunteers, pays for the organization’s activities through grants and hopes to land more sponsors to buy the equipment she hands out to up to 15 participants at a time, ages 5 to 17. She also gives paid lessons to women by appointment and plans to launch a paid lesson component for other golf newcomers next year, with the lesson fees going to pay for the free program.

It’s a labor of love, both for her father and for the youngsters who have benefited from what lessons the game has to teach on and off the course.

“I love golf, I loved my daddy and I love kids,” she says. “What a cool way to intermingle them.”