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NAPLES — At Tiburon Golf Club’s driving range, instructor Leslie Duke faces a tough crowd. He’s explaining how to swing a golf club to a dozen young, nervous students from Immokalee, many of whom have never gripped an iron or even been on a golf course.

When Duke asks what other sports they play, no one admits to anything. Eventually, sheepishly, one boy says he plays baseball.

The kids are a bit shy because they’re trying on a new pair of shoes, as Jimmy Garvin would say. He’s the Immokalee man who has gathered 47 of these children here for a Saturday morning clinic.

So Duke presses on, showing them proper golf posture.

“We’re going to take our butt and stick it out a bit,” he says. The kids giggle, but this time they follow along, wiggling and smiling.

One by one, Duke moves along the semicircle of students, taking each pair of hands into his, adjusting grips and offering a gentle stream of encouragement.

“We’re going to bend our thumbs up good. We’re just going to push our thumbs up perfect!” he says.

Duke asks who wants to take a swing?

None of the kids dare to move quite yet.

Saturday’s clinic marks the beginning of Jimmy Garvin’s effort to use golf to reach Collier County kids who need a little help. He’s planting a branch of his Washington, D.C.-based Jimmy Garvin Legacy Foundation in Southwest Florida.

The program will combine getting kids, especially minorities, onto the course with getting them into learning centers. For those children who may not have much opportunity, the idea is to get them excited about success and learning.

“It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re going,” Garvin says of his message to kids.

He’d know. His childhood Immokalee home — a “shack,” he calls it — had no toilets or running water. Through sports, he earned a chance at college. Now he runs the Langston Legacy Golf Corporation, organizes tournaments in D.C. and the Bahamas, and is ready to bring more kids along the path he took.

“It was having folks in the community put their arm around me and accept me for who I was,” Garvin says, describing how he grew up in Immokalee. “They encouraged me to do my best and good things would happen. And I did. Now it’s important for me to give back to the same kids who are left behind.”

Many of the students at the club on Saturday attend Naples’ Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, where Voncile Whitaker helps watch over them. She says the key is inspiration.

“A lot of these kids don’t have fathers, or come from single-family homes,” she says. “But it’s important they know that they can achieve success.

“Golf is about changing behavior,” Garvin says, “and today we saw a lot of kids who are excited, a lot of kids who said to us, ‘When can we do this again?’ The challenge for us is to make it an ongoing program.”

To start raising money for a learning center and a golf practice area in the county, Garvin also hosted a three-day charity invitational that drew 62 players and wraps up today.

Over time, Garvin hopes to grow the program so that it reaches hundreds of children in the region. For now, he’s happy if the kids step beyond what they’re comfortable with — if they are willing to try on those new shoes.

Back on the range, 11-year-old Ralph Louis is one of the first in instructor Duke’s group to step up and take a club, perhaps more coerced than willing. The kids still feel safer in their semicircle of friends than in front of it, instinctively keeping a warm body on each side.

Alone at the tee, Louis starts off with a few misses, but soon a sharp crack sends the ball skimming along the grass. It’s not a majestic shot, but the Immokalee student seems pleased, and Duke smiles.

Gradually, the kids feel comfortable enough to stand on their own and form a line along the range, clubs whirling and balls flying off into the distance (sometimes, anyway).

Asked about his first swings, Louis is concise.

How’d you feel before you tried it?

“Nervous.”

And how’d you feel afterward?

“Good.”