The club expects their golf proth and their assistant pros to make sure everything's perfect.
We want a club row that can play like Tiger, teach like butch merchandise like Ralph Lauren, and tell jokes like Bob Hope.
Right, it is absolutely The problem is the amount of pay for the amount of work.
It doesn't mesh for clubs.
If you don't make these changes, you're not going to get the people you want. Your product is going to suffer. People are not going to want to come play there, They're going to go elsewhere, and you're eventually going to go out of business.
Is seth while helping He's the right guy in the driver's seat, But is there a vehicle he can drive that can make it any better?
People are put on earth to make everybody's lives better, right, Like? How can he not want to be surrounded by those people?
Right then? And that's what our PGA professional is.
You know, it's not perfect, We're not perfect times far from perfect.
We're moving the needle, making a lot.
Of progress and I hope people are noticing it. But that's not the point either, right. The point is leaving the room better. And I'm going to keep fighting to do that every day.
Put another log on the fire Nobody here is to get the time.
Welcome to the fire Pit with Matt Janella.
In part one of this series of podcasts on the club pro crisis, we got the background on how and why I'm doing this. In short, I said something ignorant. I think most would call it stupid, and many did. It's hard to be stupid without being ignorant, but I'd like to think you can be ignorant without being stupid. Anyway, For more context, I hope you've listened to Part one to summarize my sincere apologies to club pros and PGA professionals. I appreciate you, and many of you I consider friends.
It's your humility and selflessness that are actually part of the problem. As one club pro told me, you're not good at promoting yourselves. You're too busy helping others, and thus you're often taken for granted. On that note, I want to thank some of the sponsors of the Firepit collective. Dormy Workshop is an incredible company, a golf family business based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where all they do is
make quality leather headcovers and accessories. Go to Dormy Workshop dot com and use fire Pit fifteen for fifteen percent off your next purchase. And then there's Link Soul, the lifestyle clothing brand I've worn on and off the course, in and out of the water for ten years. Polos hats, hoodies, shorts, pants and T shirts. Make par nott War and go to link Soul dot com and use promo code fire Pit twenty five for twenty five percent off your next purchase.
All right, For part two of this series, we start with Shane Ryan, author of several golf books, which includes Slaying the Tiger, Chasing the Legends, and The Cup They Couldn't Lose. Ryan has written for Grantlin, Paste Magazine, and The New York Times, and in May of twenty twenty two, wrote a story for Golf Dies entitled The Club Pro Crisis. Why did you feel compelled or sort of inspired to do what you did in telling that the story that you've told here?
Yeah, I mean, like you, Matt, I didn't know a lot about this at all. I was not familiar with this world. You know, you know your club pro when you go practice or play, and you sort of take them for granted and you don't realize that, hey, they might be working seventy hours a week and they might be under incredible stress and you know, not making as much money as they want and all that. It actually
stemmed from a conversation I had. I wrote a book about the Ryder Cup, and in the course of it, you know, I talked with the number of different people, and basically through the crazy paths that sometimes happened, I ended up talking with the club pro who said, you know, you really need to look at this issue. It's happening everywhere. It's a big deal. It's like a basically an epidemic. And so that kind of piqued my interest and I
sort of, you know, put a pin on it. And then when I had time, I threw a tweet out there just saying, you know, is this something that's happening. Do you feel like you're not in control of your time, You're being overworked, you're being underpaid, mistreated, whatever. And the response was unbelievable, not just people you know, tweeting back at me, but tagging everybody in that they knew. I got a ton of emails and yeah, then it was just off to the races, going wow, I had no idea.
This was such a phenomenon, and yeah, the story idea was born from that.
More on Shane Ryan's reporting in a minute for now back to Chandler Withington, who we heard from throughout part one of this series. Withington is formerly of Seminal Marion and Hazeltine, which is where he resigned from his post as head professional in twenty twenty one.
So the summer of twenty one is when my wife and I really started having a conversation about is this us? And it was really accelerated in our three year old now she's two. You know, sometimes you go a week fourteen days without seeing your kids awake, and you know, two year olds don't have the memory. You know, my two year old looked at me one day when I was home. She looks at me and she goes, what are you doing in mommy's house? She didn't know who I was?
And that was it. That was that was all I.
Needed, you know, to do, Like, if my daughter doesn't know who I am, then what are we really doing here?
Here?
From Shane Ryan's reporting and platform, several of these issues have been exposed and according to censu's Art of War, if you know the enemy in yourself. You need not fear the result of one hundred battles. Here's Cody Sinkler, director of golf operations at the Park in West Palm Beach, Florida.
I think golf pros are in a place right now where I don't know if fed up is the word, but we're a little sensitive in the golf pro crisis.
Shane's article highlighted what is very common.
I mean, what's highlighted in that article is are examples of the lives of a lot of golf pros, if not the majority of golf pros.
And here's Connor Evers, who graduated from the PGM program at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He did internships in Massachusetts, Jackson Hole, Detroit, and his last one was at Adare Manor in Ireland. At twenty five years old, he's been to thirty countries, which serves him well at his current role of expedition planning manager for Haversham and Baker, a company that describes themselves as quote the country club
of international golf travel. Here's Evers on the impact of Shane Ryan's.
Story when that article came out.
I mean my social media and text blew up. I mean that morning when that drop, everyone was talking about it. I mean everyone that I'm connected with or in the golf industry. That's just kind of how my life is.
But it was great.
It definitely got you know, talking points, and I know a few of my friends their members came up and was I mean, they're there every single day, but I guess that was reading that article. A lot of people as members were like, oh, I guess I should be a little bit more thankful for what you guys do for me. And that happened actually quite a few times, tough out a couple of my people that I know.
So yeah, it was pretty interesting. That was very lightning, and I definitely think that was kind of the spark that kind of let the fire, if you will. With the whole conversation a lot.
More Back to Shane Ryan, one thing I would say is that the people I spoke to that are working on this are not necessarily you know, these idealists or anything. And what the message they gave me, and I think it's an important message, is that for clubs, if you don't make these changes, you're not going to get the people you want. Your product is going to suffer. People are not going to want to come play there, They're going to go elsewhere, and you're eventually going to go out of business.
Right.
This is not some kind of charity thing you need to do. This is like a life and death thing that all golf clubs need to look at because it is crucial to their survival.
One of the things that needs looking at. One of the battles is work life balance or imbalance. Here's robins Manly, who became a class A pro twenty years ago. He was an assistant pro at Breckenridge Golf Club for both decades. After getting married at the age of forty six, he left the golf industry and although he still has his PGA membership and teaches on occasion, his current focus is real estate.
I don't have the answer, but I think it definitely comes from a misunderstanding of what that PGA logo really means and what the value that we bring and us as we have a hard time tooting our own horn, I think as PGA professionals of really going to our employer and saying, look this is these are the I taught and these are the number of golfers that I brought to the game that are now avid golfers that are now buying clubs and now joining Ladies League and
Men's League. And we've got to do a better job ourselves of promoting that and letting our employer know our value. But it is there's not a perfect answer, for sure, because golf is a sign up to sundown business and if you're not there, it's rowned upon.
And so.
I don't have the answer. And I and I've been out of the business for a couple of years, so I'm not actively in the grind. But the reason I left was I wanted to get married and I knew that that was not going to that wasn't going to work eighty hours and not being with my new bride wasn't and financially wasn't going to work. But I use my golf connections to now move into the real estate world, which has been awesome. So it was a great, great glad to still be a PGA member. I'll be a
life member here pretty soon. And but yeah, I don't have the perfect answer, but it is absolutely The problem is the amount of pay for the amount of work.
Doesn't mesh for.
A deeper dive in context back to Chandler Wington.
If you rewind and you got to talk to Seth. February twenty twenty. Seth invited me and Kerry Cosby and a few others down to Florida. He wanted to have kind of like a side council. You know, He's like, tell me, tell me what's really going on. You know that the board is going to tell me what's going on, but what's really going on?
And how can I help?
Went around the table at the reef, which I'm sure you've been to. You know, Bob Ford, you know, was retiring. He said, look, Seth, you're a financial guy. I think you know pension program be really impactful. And that's where you know, Seth started a deferred compensation program which is
really impactful. And that's what that conversation started from. Went around the table and it got to me and I said, look, Bob, I said, pension's impactful, no doubt, right, But I tell you right now, like the twenty five year old kid's going to look at that laugh because they're getting out because of something else. I said, I think the biggest threat to our industry is the expectation of our time,
and we are the Titanic heading towards the Iceberg. And if we can't reset expectations with the club managers and the club leaders and the boards, we're going to hit the Iceberger and it's going to think this. And I looked right over Bob. I said, Bob, don't even say it, because I know what you're thinking. Like, I mean, here's a guy who worked Oakmont and Seminal right said you busted your ass. And I'm not trying to call younger generation or even me lazy, but things have changed, is
all I'm telling you. Is like the job that you did for so long is not the way it is anymore. And Bob goes, I am laughing parts I hear it, and I see it as it said. It's going to feel like global warming. It's like one of those things where it's like we should look at this and we should start taking measures now, because you can't just reverse the cycle. You know, when you get there right, it
takes years to reverse it. I said, look at the size of Peach and programs are going like this, the amount of you know, young kids coming in or going like this, The supply is going like this.
Ever since COVID.
So if the supply is going like this and the game is going like this, where are we in five years?
Pretty scary?
Connor evers again on how and why he left.
I guess the big thing was just the the hours. You know, eventually, I guess that I'm twenty five, I eventually want to have a family and kids. You know, it's not the same everywhere, but it is, you know, long hours, and I just wanted, I guess, more structure. I guess that's that was kind of the biggest thing for me, Just wanting more structure, you know, the classic cliche nine to five. I know people don't like that,
but I do like I like structure like that. So I guess the main thing was for me was the hours. I mean, I definitely do miss a lot. I mean, I don't play as much golf, to be honest with you, as as I did. That's the one thing that I do miss. I guess I'm kind of seeing it, you know, from from two things, from two sides of it now, But just the hours, I would say, to answer that question.
There here's Brad Snow of Raleigh, North Carolina. We heard from him in part one. He's twenty nine, he graduated from Mencia State and Golf Management. His internships were at TPC Potomac, Durrell and Sleepy Hollow. He worked at Philly Cricket Club for two summer seasons and a winter at John's Island in Florida. He spent time as a head fitter at Liberty National, and although he's still a Class A professional, he's been out of the greengrass aspect of
the industry since twenty nineteen. He's now an online club retailer. His thoughts on a thirty to forty thousand dollars annual salary and a work life imbalance.
So through the internships.
The PGA requires that all internships are paid through PGM, which is awesome.
We're very lucky.
It kind of spans quite a spectrum though, once you get into it, because I was lucky enough to have a couple internships that had housing kind of built in. I lived at the gatehouse right as he first go on property at Sleepy Holl. Me and two others or another intern in an assistant lived right in the gatehouse there, which was incredible.
I mean I could I woke our. The short game area was in my backyard.
So you know, we hang out there, kind of true bagger vance style, turn someone's headlights on, or you know, take a lantern out after work, whatever, chips and balls or whatever.
So positions like that. You're lucky so you can kind of save a little more.
But I mean, yeah, once you're out looking at that thirty to forty number, is is a nice number. You hear a lot of numbers lower than that, But it's really not what you think about when you're getting into that. It's you might have your kind of site set a little further down the road. You know, you got to put in the time grind it out if you want to make money in green Grass.
You're not doing it as an assistant.
So yeah, it's definitely you're looking at that thirty to forty if you really want to grind it out and teach.
I wasn't much of.
An instructor myself, never really leaned into that side of the game too much. But there are opportunities if you want to really press it and grind you can make a little extra. But it's always tight, that's for sure.
From a couple of twenty somethings to Butch Harmon, whose family has been entrenched in this industry for nearly a century and can always be counted on for a frank and informed perspective. People are leaving the industry at a rapid rate. Schools are closing, you know. Clubs are pinching budgets, and when they do, they tend to like pinch from the people component. You know, it's not going to be
on the quality of golf course itself. They look around and they go, oh, well, we'll just we'll just only keep one pro or one assistant, or just two assistants instead of three. I mean, and younger people coming up in this industry are saying, I got to work that long for that and be required to do all of that, why would I?
I'm out, I don't disagree with it.
And now you have at the university level you have the PGM programs, which is run by the PGA. A lot of good programs around the country, have a very good one here at UNLV where I live in Las Vegas. I try and do a lot of work with them,
but they're taught from a manual. They have a manual, a teaching manual, a business manual, this and that, And they get upset with me because I always speak either at their graduations or I get them out to my places that once a year and talk to them and I say, Tom, look the first thing you need to do when you graduate from this course and I hold their manual UF I said, this is what you're tested on.
This manual right here. Throw that in the garbage because.
You're never going to use it again because everything in here is cookie cut. You're you're going to be a club pro. You're going to be if you choose to go here. You're going to do a lot more than this test you just took from this book that tells you how to do stuff, because you're going to have to know how to deal with your members. You're going to have to know how to deal with your ladies, golf Association, your junior clinics, all these stuff. You're going
to have to know that. And you hit the nail on the head when you said that. In this day and age, the club pro is asked to do a lot, but is not compensated for all that he does, because a good club can't function without a good head pro
and then his staff that he brings on. The bigger the club, the bigger the staff, I mean I was just at wing Foot a few weeks ago playing and a member guests there, and I think Mike Gilmo must have six or seven guys on his staff to take care of all the stuff that take That's a big club. It's thirty six holls, a lot of members. But even on a smaller version of that, like you said a minute ago, you know they don't want to because they're paying Everybody used to be in the old days that
pay anything. You made all your money from me. First of all, you started the year and get your club storage money.
That helped you not.
Have to go to the bank and buy a lot of money to do your merchandising and so on so forth. You had your range programs, so that helped you had to guarantee income. You don't have any of that anymore. You have whatever they're paying you. And the question I would ask you and all the people that are watching that, is that an incentive to do a good job. Maybe not, It's an incentive to exist, But.
I don't know.
Back to Cody Sinkler, Yeah.
Our PGM enrollment is down significantly. PGM programs are closing clemsons I think closed. Florida State's closed. There are less people that want to do this. It's because of the work life balance we've gone so far this way and the pay. I mean there are there are still jobs paying twelve thirteen dollars an hour for atink golf profession who we want to be in the PGM program, which by the way, costs about ten grand to finish, and we want them to have a bachelor's degree.
And there are jobs advertising twelve thirteen fourteen dollars an hour.
So it's not just a work life balance. It's never not about the money, and the numbers across the board are indeed dire. Here's Brad Sniper.
Going into the program, we were told I'm not sure if this is still one hundred percent true or even if it was at the time, but going into the program, we were told that within five years of gaining certification, within five years fifty percent of PGA pros out of the business.
And keeping a running tab of issues. It's work life balance, money, and then there's the free access to information or instruction. We've already heard from Kieran Kenwar of Mombai, India. She's been in the US since two thousand and five. She has a PhD in kinesiology. She's an LPGA Master instructor and she's the chair of the golf department at Stanton Universe Stein, Orange County, California. She's been teaching the game for thirty three years.
Yeah, they're underappreciated.
There's no value, and now in this day and age, they don't make what they whatever they deserve because the most popular teacher on this planet is YouTube, and the attitude is, hey, I've been messed up by so many pros, or why should I spend money when it's on YouTube?
Nobody realized.
It's like even in medicine, where a doctor is such a highly trained person, people a lot.
I mean, I'm one of them as well.
I look up some whatever I feel I have and look it up on Internet and maybe self medicaid if I can. So the value of somebody that's good is also being lost because YouTube is the biggest instructor for anything you want to know.
Which brings us to yet another battle back to Robin's manly of Breckinridge, then Karen and then Butch. Is it quite simply an awareness issue, Robins?
I think that if I had to put one, that was probably one. But one A is still the money. Where's the money going to come from? When you run the.
Budget of the golf course?
Where's the money going to come from to pay all your assistants one hundred grand? And the assistant superintendent's you know, at the top guys, the head pros and gms, depending on how the course is set up, tend to be okay. It's that second level that that I'm passionate about because I was in that position so long. That has the
hardest time. And then so new people aren't coming in as much applying for jobs because that's where they have to start, and they know they've seen their buddies do it, or they've been around it enough to know that, well, I'm going to have to work eighty hours for forty five thousand dollars a year. And you know in this day and age that that's a hard You know, it's a single guy that's living with roommates. You can pull that off, but how honors.
Are going to last?
There are many club pros who are not getting what they deserve and they work long hours.
I mean, there's no denying that, whether they're good or not.
And they also a lot of clubs have the silly thing that you bundle up a good teacher with selling. You know, hey, sir, this red shirt looks great. You should get six of them, you know that kind of thing. I mean, why, why is the one person doing everything if he or she is a good instructor. The clubs don't realize the value of a good instructor and promote them. There are some big corporations that now say you will get fifty percent of what you.
Charge.
So I would have to go back if I worked for a private club to what I charged in two thousand and six when I first came to the US.
You know, how does that make sense?
And consider for the club that it's a pittance of what compared to what they are making.
How does it help them to charge the poor pro so much?
And how do they benefit versus If you have a happy pro, he or she is getting people to dine at the club and play other sports at the club, hang out, do events, do other stuff.
You know. So it is it is true that club pro's good.
If they're good, be the life and soul of a golf course, and really, you know, bump up the popularity of a golf club. But I don't think any management companies realize that, so then you have to be an independent contractor, and then you have this whole other thing called marketing, which becomes really like in many cases like a salesman type of job, which not everybody's good at.
Where I'm at right now and having this conversation with you, if you ask me what I what I what my feedback is, and what I'm hearing, it's an awareness issue on that very thing, which it's the very thing. It's club to club, course to course, taking for granted the person or people who are out their selflessly making an
effort to make their lives better. And there's only so much time in a day, and there's only so many days in a week that one person or a team of small people or whatever the number is that can execute on a day to.
Day basis absolutely absolutely, And you know, how do you change that? How do you change the whole personality of the business now compared to the personality of the business I grew up in. I'm not saying they need to go back to the way it was thirty fifty sixty years ago. Time march is on, but this is where we are, This is where we have arrived at this position now. And there are so many golf pros in the country today. Head pros. They can't break eighty. They
don't really know how to teach. Their job is to sell shirts and hats and stuff and clubs and the pro shops so the club can make money on it. And they're paid a salary to do that or maybe a small percent of it.
Well, that to me is not a golf pro. That's a clerk.
That's a golf pro is a guy that handles all the teaching and clinics and everything the Men's associating Women's Association.
The clubs have taken all that over.
Committees run all those things now, But yet the club expects their golf pros and their assistant pros to make sure everything's perfect. Everything has to be run right. We need this is what we need to do. You go to apply for a job today and you sit down with a committee that's doing the interview and they're telling you, this is what we need you to do. This is the pro we want, this is what we want from our pro time. What are you going to pay me, Well,
this is what we're paying to go. Really, you want all that for this and that sounds cruel, but that's reality. And I know I'm going to take a lot of flak because I just said that. But I've been around this business my whole life. I'm seventy nine years old. I grew up in golf. I don't know anything else, but God, I don't know how to do anything else. I mean, if ever made GOFE legal, I'd have to rob at seven to eleven to make a living do that. Maybe I could be a used car salesman or something.
But this, I've been around this business my whole life. I've watched it the way it has evolved and the way it is kind of how we got to the high point and then how everything started to go down. And like I say it, please you pros. It works so hard at your clubs. I'm not downgrading you. I just want a better existence for you.
Here's Cody Sinkler. Is that what you would say first and foremost is is this is an awareness issue.
It's it's an awareness issue. It's an issue where.
We've sort of taken this path of working all this overtime and you know, eventually knowing it's going to pay off, and it's just gone too far, and we've gotten to the point where.
It's the norm. It's expected. It's expected for an assistant.
Golf professional to make thirty thousand dollars a year and work I would say fifty hours is probably a conservative average for this person. And they're expected to have a college degree. They're expected to be either finish that PGM program that you mentioned or working on that. It's just
coming from. It's hard when you look at there's so many different facilities, right You have driving ranges, you have public golf courses, you have your top golfs, golf techs, and you have your high end private clubs.
They all have their different challenges.
You know, coming from a family owned public golf course up in the Midwest where golf season's only six months out of the year, they have revenue challenges. It's hard for them to afford to pay an assistant pro fifty thousand dollars a year. They might have to pay an assistant pro ten dollars an hour because there just isn't
revenue the golf club. The golf course is probably not making more than five six, seven hundred thousand dollars and they have to maintain the whole golf course with that in the private world, I definitely think it's an awareness issue because there is more money, but I don't know that decision makers quite realize what the golf pros are doing on a week in, a week out basis or a day in a day out basis.
So yeah, question, Yes, I think Shane's article.
Was a game changer for us, and I think it's really started this conversation.
Shane Ryan. As you got going in the reporting and you started talking to all these different people, some on the record, some off the record with you know, and for obvious reasons they wanted to they wanted to keep their jobs that they did have. What's kind of some of the major takeaways for you, you know now, even to this day and probably the feedback that you've received, what sticks in your mind, and whether it's a stat or a fact or a figure or a quote or a comment.
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the pessimistic thing that sticks in my mind is that it felt like I was learning, on one hand about an industry that is fundamentally broken in terms of the working conditions that club pros exist under, that there is so much demanded of them that there is a system in place where this was you know, I won't say it was fine with people, but it was standard and it was expected.
And all of a sudden, a new generation is coming up saying we don't want to work like this, and so, you know, places are losing their pros. But they're faced with a reality where to meet the to meet the standards of what people how they want to work now saying okay, maybe you know, you get a weekend off once in a while, maybe only work fifty hours a
week instead of seventy or eighty. It would mean hiring more people, and that's something that they don't want to do for obvious reasons, right because that affects their budget and their bottom line. But the reality is the clubs who are not doing that are falling behind because either they can't fill positions or when they do fill positions,
they're not filling them with the best people. And so you have this unbelievable sort of schism between what is expected, whether you're you know, the board at a club or or the manager of a club versus what is the reality of what club pros want to do with their jobs, and so were the gap between it is so wide, and it got worse during the pandemic, and it's hard to see sometimes how it gets better.
For a deeper dive in context. Back to Chandler Withington.
So here, if you had to ask me, like, Okay, what is at the heart of it, what is the issue and what can be.
Done about it?
You know, I've spent probably three years having this conversation. I spent an afternoon on PGM row at the show on twenty asking the PGM leaders before COVID, like what's going on with PGMs? Like what are the kids doing? And how many understanding? If they're getting out?
Why?
And I think maybe you got quoted in the story. I think Bobby Bruns from Methodists, said Chandler of The reality is Google told these kids that this job sucks. You know, the Internet came along and told them, like, you know, you can go work for Google, Amazon, work nine to five, have weekends off, have benefits, out of school, get paid double, probably play more golf.
Not have to move every six months.
And you know, until then, you know, people like myself, I mean, I was like, well, this is the job, this isn't so bad. I can do this, Like heck, this is great. But like the Internet told them that this job sucks. So younger kids will look at this and be like, this job sucks, so they've gone somewhere else. In the PGM enrollment again is is beens steadily decreasing. And I think the issue is the time expectation. So who has the time expectation? Where is that coming from?
Every generation wants to hand down what their experience was, So you know, if I had to work all these hours, you're going to have to work all these hours, right, And we've got to break that cycle. There's there's fixed mindset. Fixed mindset is the way things have been or the way things will always be, in the way that they should be. So let's just maintain growth. Mindset is, well, that's the way it was, but that's not the way it'll always be. Let's find a smarter way to do things.
Here's Rick Riley, another voice from the first episode. Riley is the director of golf at Wiltshire Country Club in Los Angeles, where he has worked for over thirty years.
He's the son of Pat Riley, a former marine, and in addition to being the pro at Annandale Golf Club in Pasadena for thirty years, Pat was the legendary past president of the PGA of America who competed in a US Open PGA Championship and in nineteen ninety prior to the PGA Championship at Shoal Creek, Riley used the timing and leverage to make sure that all pg of America championship venues had open membership policies. Pat Riley was inducted into the PGA Hall of Fame in two thousand and five.
What's your advice to sort of young aspiring club pros? What do you what do you tell him to look out for? What do you tell him to do? What do you tell them about the about the future of the of this industry?
Well, I mean the golf industry. There's there's more people playing golf than ever right now. You know the issue right now I see with with in my situation, and this is kind of across the board at all. You know, when when COVID hit, you know, they're giving away free money and I couldn't I couldn't hire guys, couldn't find guys to hire. I mean, we're now, I'm don't wage in California four years ago, it was twelve dollars it's
it's going to be eighteen or nineteen dollars. So I'm looking at now I'm competing finding my my staff, competing against Walmart. He's going to be paying twenty two, twenty four bucks an hour. You know, the all the fast food in California, it's going to be twenty two dollars next year to work at a fast food restaurant. So
that just that just raises a bar for everyone. So, you know, golf clubs, private clubs, public courses, daily fees, they all have to be aware of that if they're if they're looking for quality people, they're gonna have to start paying a quality wage. And the guys are working for me, they all like to play golf, they like to teach, they like they like working in the business.
But you know, it's tough. I mean, there's there's some there's there are some tough days the last couple of years when you're short of staff and you're working sixty hour weeks and everybody's on the golf course, everyone wants to play and you're just i mean, you're just worn out. At the end of the day, you got to kind of say, okay, let me let me look at it. I look at I'm hanging out here, this one hundred acre property here in the middle of l A and
there's cars. That's like in a little ow east. So you got to you got to look at all the all the benefits of being in the business. It's not necessarily going to make You're not going to make You're not going to be a millionaire, but you're gonna you're gonna have a good comfortable life. Put in the hours.
You're you're playing a game that's fun to play. People are you know, people are rushing to get out of work to go around, run around and play teen holes and we're there all day long and it's it's uh, it's a great place to be. But you know, once again, you've got to put in the hours. You got to have a love for it. I mean, my dad always said, there's to be a good PGA professional you get five points, you got to be a player. You got to be a teacher, you got to be an administrator, you got
to be a rules expert. Probably most important, you have to be a people person. You cannot survive on my side of the business if you don't interact with people well and take care of people.
So to recap the issues or battles being fought here, it's work life balance, it's money, it's the Internet, it's awareness. And if you don't love the game or have the right skills to help others learn and love the game, it's not for you. And then along came a global pandemic which exacerbated all of the above. I asked Shane Ryan to compare and contrast the idea that throughout COVID club pros and PGA professionals can be compared to say, nurses. Now, I get it, it's not the same. I'm not going
to make that mistake again. But in the sense that both professions are at the core made up of selfless and underappreciated individuals who, throughout the worst of COVID provided a thankless task on the front lines of trying to help the greater good, it seemed worth comparing and contrasting.
I think it is fair to say, you know, the nurse thing, though, presents an interesting contrast because it doesn't take a huge leap for you or I to imagine what being a nurse at a hospital packed with COVID patients, with all the stress and the hour and you know, how damaging that would be. Right, that's simple to reach that conclusion. I think what makes it harder for the general public with club pros is that the initial instinct
is a little different. It's to say, Oh, these guys get to work at a golf course, right, how great is that? And so it's harder for us to imagine that they are existing in conditions of similar stress where they're in a service job essentially. Right, So they're dealing with all these members and in the pandemic. Now there's more members than ever or more participants than ever, They have to work longer hours than ever, and it's not
as easy to understand the stress that they're under. But we said, it got worse and it exposed a problem that's been existing for a long time, but it magnified it and exposed it. And I think, you know, things like I wrote, and I'm certainly not the only one. People are being far more outspoken on this now. And so, yeah, it's come to the forefront of attention. And yeah, like I said before, it gets to the question of now, what do you do now? How do you fix it? If you can fix it?
In the next episode of this series on the Club pro crisis, we talk about possible solutions.
That's That's what I kind of see, is like there's this generational gap. And I'm told Seth and Peprah twenty, I said, you've got to get the leaders of CMAA, the Club Managers Association, the same room with PGA, and we need to understand each other better. You know, how are things changing, who are we where now, what are we going and what is crucial art to our success and what will ultimately cripple us if we don't address it.
And later in the series, we hear from Brian Soulet of Penn State's PGM program, Seth Waw, the pg of America CEO, and Susie Whaley, the pg of America's first female president.
Most of us really want to give back to our communities.
That's why we do what we do.
And we felt really strongly that we were doing that in an unbelievable way. And I think we went home feeling really good about ourselves, Like we.
Got to see people every day, which I.
Think was a gift for us and for our mental health. But we also got to see people getting outside and enjoying it. And maybe if we gave a little, a little bit of joy in their day during this incredibly scary time. We were doing the right thing. But what that turned into was a perception that we were able to keep those hours going, that we could work very long hours, seven days a week, with smaller teams and with the same amount of club participants, if not more
than we had had prior. And so it turned into this really enormous balance that was getting out of balance crisis. I would say no, but it's taken us still. And I say that loosely, us being PGA professionals and leadership, to educate boards, to educate facilities, to educate municipalities, to
educate consumers as to what's going on. And while revenues are increasing at facilities because of Golf's participation dramatically, many facilities are using those revenue increases for capital expensuor scriptures. And I happen to believe that your human capital is your best capital.
Put another logoal the fire. Nobody here is given time
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