This week brings one of my favorite tournaments, the First Tee Open played at Pebble Beach. The inspired format pairs 78 world-weary Champions tour warriors Cheap England Football Shirts with wide-eyed kids who learned the game (and a lot more) at a First Tee facility, of which there are 750 across the country. It’s always cute to watch these crotchety pros be thoroughly charmed by their young amateur partners, who invariably have impeccable manners, sophisticated golf knowledge and an inspiring personal story.

To be chosen for the tournament these youngsters go through a rigorous interview process, and the trip to Pebble is a once-in-a-lifetime reward for all of their hard work and good deeds. For everyone else, it’s a chance to celebrate the First Tee and its success stories. We’ve all seen the commercials, and it’s easy to roll your eyes at the endless talk of “core values,” but the First Tee Spanish Teams Football Tops can and does impact young people in a powerful way. The program’s already impressive reach may get a lot bigger in the near future. Since the First Tee’s inception in 1997, some five million kids have benefited from programs across the country. “The most important investment a society can make is in its young people,” Joe Louis Barrow Jr., the executive director of the First Tee, told me in a recent interview. It is with that simple, profound mission that the First Tee will announce on Thursday morning in Pebble Beach a new campaign to reach 5 million more kids by the end of 2017. To do so the First Tee has set the ambitious target of raising $100 million by the end of 2012. The new capital Valencia Football Shirt campaign will, hopefully, allow the First Tee to double its number of locations, but Barrow has a broader vision: “We want to move what we do to where the young people are.”

I’ve seen the First Tee’s impact firsthand, and not just during a splashy tournament week. When the First Tee Open was created six years ago, a local facility was needed to serve as a beneficiary and a beacon. A site was chosen 15 miles inland from Pebble Beach in Salinas Valencia Soccer Jersey, the town where I grew up and now live. The First Tee of Monterey County has turned into a very impressive facility, with a large, comfy clubhouse boasting brand-new computers. There are always tutors available to help with after-school homework. The 9-hole executive course is stellar, and there’s a spacious driving range. But what makes this First Tee so valuable is its setting — a world away from Pebble Beach, in an economically-depressed part of town that is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Many neighborhood kids have become trapped in the destructive cycle of gang violence. Golf would seem an unlikely vehicle for reaching these kids, but thanks to aggressive outreach, the First Tee of Monterey County has become an important part of the community.