Agronomy

Two aspects promise to gain momentum for the year ahead in the management of agronomy and golf course maintenance departments:

Dual Assistant Superintendent tracks. Traditionally, golf course maintenance operations have been intensely focused on hiring or developing assistant superintendents to become future superintendents. But situations often occur when a club’s assistants get new jobs elsewhere in the same timeframe and the club is left with a challenging situation until new talent can be hired or developed. Providing two tracks for assistant roles can be a better approach. The first track is for individuals who want to become superintendents and the second for those who want to become permanent assistants and stay at the club. Under a two-track system, the permanent assistant can always be the backstop should other assistants leave at the same time or the golf course superintendent and an assistant leave at the same time. This creates a level of stability during the transition period. Additionally, the learning curve for new hires can be greatly enhanced by the permanent assistant’s knowledge and experience. This approach is proving to be in the club’s best interest, by adding a level of security in the golf course maintenance operation.

Hiring from within versus open recruitment. Golf course superintendents often hire from within, and when an assistant leaves, there is a tendency to look to promote an assistant in training or a foreman, spray tech or irrigation tech. It’s understandable to favor employees who are knowledgeable about a club’s property and its personalities and culture. But if the training and exposure that has been given to these team members has prepared them properly for the job, they should be able to compete in the open market against applicants from outside the organization for the role. By putting a current employee up with outside candidates for a position, many things can be learned. While these in-house candidates may seem to have an advantage, what if they don’t compare well with an out-of-organization candidate? Does that mean the training they’ve received wasn’t adequate? Or that when initially recruiting them as team members, the club didn’t get the best and the brightest? At the same time, does someone coming from the outside offer more varied experience than the in-house candidates that would be beneficial to the organization? Ensuring that a broader search is conducted will lead to the golf course superintendent being able to identify training and recruiting areas to improve upon, which in turn will lead to higher-performing teams and better golfing conditions for club members.

Club Trends – Winter 2024

By Armen Suny, Search & Consulting Executive, KOPPLIN KUEBLER & WALLACE. He can be reached via email: armen@kkandw.com.

The 100th version of the EW Podcast features two of their most popular guests over the past two years, Armen Suny and Dave Wilber. In this segment they talk about about the state of the industry, and as always, end up with some very funny stories and a great conversation. Thank you to all who have joined as guests and to all who have listened, making the EarthWorks Podcast one of the most successful in the turf industry.

About the Armen Suny…

Armen Suny is a search executive with Kopplin Kuebler & Wallace. He was the superintendent at Cherry Hills Country Club for the “1985 PGA Championship” and went on to host six PGA Tour events at Castle Pines. He was the general manager at Shadow Creek for Steve Wynn. Suny was the assistant Superintendent at Merion Golf Club for the 1981 US Open and an intern at Aronimink Golf Club for the 1977 US Amateur. Armen can be reached at (303) 570-2741 or via email at armen@kkandw.com.

Suny’s education is in turfgrass management from Penn State. His experiences include: Golf course design (Sagebrush Golf and Sporting Club, No. 1 new golf course in Canada, 2009 with Rod Whitman and Richard Zokol,) PGA Tour tournament director, and golf course residential project workouts.

EARTHWORKS PODCAST

The selection of your golf course superintendent may possibly be the most important decision that a club can make. Is there another position in the club that, through poor performance, can cause the club to shut down for an entire year?

If you lose your greens, your course will close down, revenues will die just as surely as the grass has died. While this may be an extreme example, consider the negative effects that several years of suspect maintenance practices may have on your course for years to come.

Recently, I had a conversation with a gentleman who had been on the selection committee of a club on the East Coast where I had completed a superintendent search two decades ago. His thoughts about golf course maintenance were an interesting example of why professional search services are needed for clubs.

He explained, that in his business, a Wall Street firm, you can blame bad performance on your predecessor for only one year, after that you owned the problems. On your golf course, the problems that can be left underground and unseen, may, and often do take more than one year to fix.

Recruiting a great superintendent for your golf course is a challenge. For the last 25 years, KOPPLIN KUEBLER & WALLACE has been up to that challenge, successfully recruiting superintendents for the finest clubs in the country.

The key attributes for the superintendent are a bit different from other club positions, in that the technical skills required are climate specific as opposed to the other key club positions that use the same skills in any region.

Your club’s superintendent candidate profile is the foundation to our search. Through meeting with the selection committee, key staff members, reviewing course conditions, club expectations, agronomics, cuture plans, and budgets, we develop the profile that will identify the ”ideal” Candidate. Through this process you will begin to understand what makes a candidate a finalist – a finalist your new Superintendent and ultimately your club’s new superintendent – a success.

Our ability to identify immensely qualified candidates is, to put it very simply, unmatched. Our pool of candidates is not limited to only those individuals actively seeking a new position. This is an important distinction to make. With our industry outreach, we recruit successful candidates who may not be looking for new opportunities. It is typical for our finalists to come equally from our advertisements and our industry outreach.

We have the wherewithal to evaluate the technical ability of a candidate to be successful in another climatic region. This has allowed us to greatly increase the pool of talented candidates for many positions.

Superintendent success traits include:

• Honesty
• Integrity
• Work ethic
• Intelligence
• Business sense
• Common sense
• Organizational ability
• Leadership
• Experience
• Formal education
• Agronomics
• Golf IQ
• Pragmatic perfectionism Observational skills
• Communication skills
• Green thumb

All of these traits are important in our decision-making process but these two traits – green thumb and agronomics – are key to determining the successful candidates to interview.

If being a superintendent was just science, then any reasonably intelligent person could “learn” how to grow grass and condition a golf course to its highest level. As you well know, that isn’t always the case.

Having a candidate who has worked at great clubs, attended a great turf school or has tournament experience, is all very beneficial, but even with all of that they still need to have a “green thumb.” A superintendent with a green thumb will be instinctive and intuitive about grass and see more on one trip around the golf course than a less gifted superintendent ever sees. Our experience allows us to ‘dig down into the dirt’ and discover which candidates have the proverbial “green thumb” and which don’t.

GOLF IQ

A superintendent must understand golf and golfers and have a love of the game and golf courses. That doesn’t mean that the superintendent has to be a low handicap golfer. However, they need to understand the integration of maintenance with the game of golf.

Additionally they should have the intellectual and agronomic flexibility to craft maintenance regimes that achieve playability goals while providing sustainable, aesthetically pleasing turf, bunker, and landscape conditions.

A high golf IQ will lead to great golf experiences for golfers on a daily basis through well-conceived planning, the proper staff coaching and training and the constant and vigilant inspections of the course to insure that playability goals are met.

ACHIEVING SUCCESS

Our goal is to identify five immensely qualified candidates for the final interview process and assist the committee and club in determining which candidate has the best set of technical skills for their club and the personality that will fit in seamlessly with the club’s culture.

About the Author…

Armen Suny is a search executive with Kopplin Kuebler & Wallace. He was the superintendent at Cherry Hills Country Club for the “1985 PGA Championship” and went on to host six PGA Tour events at Castle Pines. He was the general manager at Shadow Creek for Steve Wynn. Suny was the assistant Superintendent at Merion Golf Club for the 1981 US Open and an intern at Aronimink Golf Club for the 1977 US Amateur. Armen can be reached at (303) 570-2741 or via email at armen@kkandw.com.

Suny’s education is in turfgrass management from Penn State. His experiences include: Golf course design (Sagebrush Golf and Sporting Club, No. 1 new golf course in Canada, 2009 with Rod Whitman and Richard Zokol,) PGA Tour tournament director, and golf course residential project workouts.

THE BOARDROOM MAGAZINE