INTO THE SWING.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin

Failing to make the LPGA tour put Dana Rader on a course that led her to becoming one of the nation's top teaching pros.

A howling wind blows up the hill toward the teaching range at the Golf Club at Ballantyne Resort, hitting golfers square in the face. A burly businessman braces against the breeze and lines up his oversize driver, ready to tee off at a manicured practice range nearly the size of four football fields.

Dana Rader crouches beside him, one eye closed, holding a club in her right hand like a plumb line to evaluate his position. At less than an inch under 6 feet, she's about his height. Her big, muscular hands match his. Her short, blond hair is parted on one side. She softens her imposing stature with gold earrings and a gold cross on a dainty chain worn outside her powder-blue mock turtleneck. Her tips flow in a firm, but encouraging, tone. "A little more over the ball. That's good. Right there."

The golfer takes the club back and swings. The ball soars into the wind, long and straight. "That's a keeper," she says. "All the way." Neither smiles. When you're taking lessons from a golf instructor who gets $150 an hour, the smiles can wait.

Dana Rader Golf School is a testament to the power of practice, networking and prayer. Rader, a one-time golf hater who discovered the sport at 17 and later choked in her one attempt to make the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour, started her first school after a bizarre yet confidence-boosting spiritual encounter at the wheel of a moving vehicle. Then Rader, a college dropout who couldn't be bothered to get decent grades though her major was phys ed, parlayed her golf skills, people skills, ambition and connections into an LPGA National Teacher of the Year award and eventually into a business that is quickly becoming one of the state's top golf schools.

Her new school, which opened in 1998, is a major attraction at Ballantyne, a 2,000-acre development in south Charlotte. It's the biggest mixed-use project in the city's history, with plans for 4,500 homes, 550,000 square feet of retail space and 4 million square feet of office space -- four times more than in the 60-story Bank of America tower downtown. Rader's school is part of the golf course set in the 414-acre Ballantyne Corporate Park.

To boost the allure of the course and the hotel being built next to it, the developers wanted a golf school with a big-name teaching pro. "We were looking for someone who had local knowledge and could also bring us a national image," says David Conlan, director of special projects for The Bissell Cos. of Charlotte. "She had the name and the reputation." When Conlan and Bissell Cos. Chairman H.C. "Smoky" Bissell first met with Rader in 1997, she surprised them by arriving with a...