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 given time.
Welcome to the fire Pit with Matt Janella.
We're back for the fifth episode of this podcast series on the club pro crisis. This week we're looking at it through the lens of the PGA of America's Professional Golf Management. University programs one of two paths to becoming APGA member. For more on both paths, go to PGA dot org. Forward Slash membership in a four and a half to five year program involving classroom courses, paid internships,
and opportunities for player development. There are currently sevenine teen nationwide universities that offer these PGM programs while students simultaneously get a bachelor's degree in marketing or business administration, hospitality administration, recreation and park management. One of the participating universities is Penn State, and today we're talking to doctor Bryan Soul, an associate teaching professor at Penn State for fifteen years.
You'll hear Soul say that for the one hundred one hundred and twenty students in their program, they get five to eight internship offers per student. If you missed Part one, you missed some history of club pros from people like Butch Harmon.
The old days, when you've got a good job, you just stayed there forever, and the members treated you like a member.
You were great with them.
And so I think what's evolved now is the club's down all the amenities. They own, the pro shops, they own, the cards, they owned, the backrooms, they own the driving ranges. Pros are paid a salary and a little percentage of stuffs. It's a different incentive world for guys to get into business. You know.
The people said to you all the time, well.
You've been a golf pro your whole life. When you were a club pro, you must have played a lot of golf. No, not really. You're always working. You work every holiday, you work every weekend. It's a hard job. Now you have corporations on these clubs. They got the pros punch and time clocks. You know. Well, hr says you can only work forty hours a week. Well, heck we we being a golf pro my whole life. I
turned probem to sixty five. We worked the sun when the sun was up, we worked when the sun went down, and we went home. That's not the way it is anymore. It's a totally different environment. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying it's not the one that I grew up in and the one I lived in.
We've heard from Rick Riley of Wiltshire Country Club for over thirty years, whose father is in the pg of America's Hall of Fame.
It's a great place to be, but you know, once the end, you got to put in the hours. You got to have a love for it. I mean, my dad always said there's two to be a good PGA professional. You got 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.
And we've heard from Shane Ryan, author of the golf digestory entitled The Club pro Crisis, which was published in May of twenty twenty two. Ryan on the harsh reality of the industry.
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 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.
Meanwhile, in Part four, Seth Waugh, the PGA of America's CEO since twenty eighteen, talked about what he's doing to try and leave the room better than he found it.
I think we've flipped the prism on the game. And I think you know, the greatest thing about what's going on right now, Matt, is the game has had its ups and downs, for sure, but for the first time, and it's it's it's history. Golf is cool, and golf's never been cool, right, and and that's awesome, and we need to make sure we continue to promote that right
and have all these different ways to consume it now. Right, you have top golf, you have putt putt and all kinds of different forms you've got, you know, simulators you've got. And again, I've always believed, like you know, if you go shoot hoops in your backyard, you played basketball that day. It wasn't five on five with reps, right, but it was it was it was hoops and and so you know, if you put on your carpet today you play golf
and and you know and you took it. You know, check out your swinging in a mirror like you played golf that day. And we've got to embrace it in every form we possibly can't part threes, three holes, you know, hitt and balls in the way like yes, like work for all of it every day. Anything that is good for the game is ultimately good for our professionals. And so we're going to promote it and every way we can and celebrate it.
Before we get to my conversation with doctor Soule and we hear from one of his former students, I want to thank a few sponsors, starting with ag one by Athletic Greens Nutrition made powerfully Simple. You've seen the ads. It's your daily supply of nutrients and gut health. I drink it in the morning before a cup of coffee. This is my answer to trying to stay healthy and active. Go to Athleticgreens dot com, forward slash fire Pit and you'll get a free one year supply of Vitamin D
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My name is Brian Soulet. I'm a PGA professional and an assistant teaching professor at Penn State University with the PGA Golf Management Program. I've been here for fourteen years.
This idea that there is a club pro crisis. Do you buy into that concept?
I think so. I think.
In the past decade or so, we've seen a huge shift from golf facilities being able to pick and choose their employees and really get a lot of applicants for great positions. And in recent years we've seen that flip so at Penn State, we have about one hundred to one hundred and twenty students, and we're getting between five and eight positions posted with our program per student just for internships.
So we have.
Up to one thousand facilities that will contact us each year asking for access to our one hundred students. So the industry clearly is hungry for good new talent, and we're starting to see the benefits of that for our students, which is great. You know, it's giving opportunities for them to pick and choose the best jobs in the industry.
But that's on the flip side. You know, your green grass facilities specifically are the ones who are struggling because they're struggling to find really good qualified help.
And yet I'm also hearing and reading about and learning of about PGM programs closing all over. You know, at one point there wasn't a lot of them, then there was a lot of them, and now there's less of them.
There was an influx of programs, So Penn State was one of the first four and that was what it was for decades until the early two thousands.
It took off.
I think at the peak there were twenty PGA accredited university programs. Now we're down to seventeen, and it feels like that's a leveling out. I'm a Clemson graduate and we're the most recent program to close. It was Clemson University. It was kind of the perfect storm there of the COVID crisis of rising costs and higher education right and them looking for programs that were a little bit under enrolled. So I think we're probably at a leveling off now.
We're starting to see an uptick in student enrollments across the country, So I'm hoping that that means that that kind of the level that we're at right now is where we'll stay for the for the foreseeable future.
From the time that you went to Clemson to what you are now teaching, how has the education of the club pro the PGA pro evolved.
In your mind?
That's a good question. It So I graduated in two thousand and five from Clemson. The PGA's curriculum back down was training very specifically for the students to become green grass head golf professionals. So we were studying merchandising, teaching the game, customer relations, and there was even a test Matt of physically going to a lab, pulling apart a golf club and assessing somebody's grip size and re building that club, and somebody was watching you pull this thing
apart put it back together. You actually had to train to do club repair back then. So what we've seen in the past decade, let's call it, is an advancement in the education where they've dropped some of the more very traditional club pro education and they've become much more specialized. So what we're seeing now is that we've got students who are tracking very specifically, just saying early in their college career, I want to be a teacher, or I want to be a tournament director, or I want to
be a merchandiser. And they've i think, built a really good education program now where they're really specializing and allowed allowing people to pick and choose their path a little bit more specifically, rather than pushing everybody into that old school green grass golf pro kind of mold.
Which is cool, but also does that make it tough on PGM programs then, because you have a sort of a splintered set of teaching going on, and then how do you have a program to get enough students in each one of those different verticals, right, Like, you've got to have teachers in those different works, then you have to have enough students to justify a splintering of those verticals. Is that also kind of part of the problem too.
No, I think it's been a pretty cool change. So each of the university programs kind of has its own strength, right. So at Penn State, we're located in the northeast. Most of the facilities that our alumni go to are private facilities, typically upscale private, so we're able to kind of cater the way that we deliver the PGA's education towards that. But then also we have an amazing on campus facility.
It's a three day, three bay teaching and coaching center that has force plates and three D motion capture technology. So we've had a plethora of students in the past five to eight years really go down that teaching path because we're well outfitted to deliver.
That part of the curriculum.
I think the other programs each of their own strength, and that's where when students are thinking about which program do I want to attend, Which university do I want to go to, we tell them visit campus, you need to see it. You need to meet the people, You need to see what their expertise has to offer. And and that's I think part of the process is early on choosing the right university for you. So we're each each program definitely has a niche.
Bob for go back to Claude Harmon and and you know, now guys like Rick Riley at Wilsher who's been there over thirty years. You know, do you do we do you think that that kind of figurehead mega mentor you know, multitasking, you know, leader of a of a golf shop?
Uh?
Is that adot? Is that literally kind of like about to be extinct? And and it's going to be this collection of specialists that may be overseen by a quote director of golf or a president of a club or something. Is that is that ultimately kind of we're where we are or where we're headed?
I hope not, because and I don't think that we're going in that direction because enough of the new generation is being mentored by the Bob Fords, the Tony Pancake at Crooked Stick, Scott and I at Marion Golf Club. These folks are so good with people, and they've trained their assistants who have then moved on to become head professionals, to kind of have that same way about them of running a facility, being the figurehead, being a mentor. So what's been really fun for me. I've been here for
fifteen years almost at Penn State. Now some of my earliest graduates are in those positions, so they're in their mid coming up on upper thirties. A great example is a gentleman by the name of Jack Davis. He's the head professional at Essex County Club, really cool Donald Ross, just north of Boston. He's just got a great program up there. He's got a good group of assistant golf pros,
he's got a great internship program. So I think that's not going to die because those facilities need those types of people, they need those figureheads, they need, you know, in a way, they're kind of like the heroes of the golf industry, and I think that that's going to stay healthy. There are plenty of folks who want to go down that path still, but then there are also people who are like, you know what, that's not for me. I don't want to be on property Saturday and Sunday
and every single holiday. I want to be able to keep my own book right. So I'm going to go down the teaching path, or I'm going to work in New York City for an apparel company like Paulo Ralph.
Lauren and have a more normal work week.
So I think you're still going to have plenty of folks who go down that traditional path and knock it out of the park.
My name is Jack Davis. I'm the head golf professional County Club in Manchester by the Sea, Massachusetts, amazing old Club. It's the sixth club in the USGA. Don Ross was actually the head pro here over a century ago. It's top one hundred club. It's a really really wonderful place, a leak golf program, a leave tennis rackets program. I've been head pro here now. This is my seventh year, and I worked for Jack Drew at Shinnacok for eight years.
Part of that, two of which were internships when I was finishing my time at Penn State through the PGM program.
Davis also did a few winters in Florida Jupiter Hills for three years and worked for Bob Ford at Seminal for one season. This is a portion of my conversation with Davis. The PGM program that you went to that you are now probably getting interns from or PGM programs of course, Yeah, how do you think that's that sort of the program then and now has evolved.
The numbers are way down, for sure. I think that. And I'm really involved with the alumni, and I talked to Brian and Birch and I'm very much like a hands on alum. Each of the schools is different, right, They're offering different education and different geographic area. But the PGA is trying to centralize everything, and I think it's really difficult for some of the universities to get done
what they want to get done. At a bigger school like Penn State, where you're fitting into a really large ecosystem and PGM is such a small part of that, it's hard to get things done. Maybe at a different school like a Methodist or a Camel where PGM is a bigger portion of your student base, you've got a little bit more leverage as to programming, curriculum and stuff
like that. But I think the PGM programs are really trying to get students, and the PGA is trying to help the PGM programs work fruit But as this whole podcast series is about. The article in Golf Digest is about other than golf being in a great place on
a broad scale. I think it's hard for high school students who know what they might be getting into to sign up for it, if that makes sense, because the idea of loving golf, Like when I was growing I grew up in New Jersey, and when I found out about PGM, I thought it was someone was lying to me. I was like, how can this really be what I can go to college for, let alone a place like Penn State. And it was an incredible, incredible experience for me.
And it's still you explained where you went to college and what you did, and people are still like, that's a major. I'm like, yeah, it's a major.
It's great.
I work at all I mean I work at Spyglass, a Pebble Beach company. I worked at Plainfield Country Club, I work at Chitnaicock. I worked at these great places, and I was so driven and the students around me, the class above me and the class below me, my
peers were so driven. And it feels different now. It feels like it's almost a a waiting program like people do PGGM because they enjoy the game of golf, and then they're going to transition to a different major, or they're going to quickly transition to a different career path or maybe a different career path within golf. It doesn't necessarily feel, and not through the fault of the PGM programs,
like you're creating forty head pros a year. It seems like you're creating one head pro year and then other people who will have golf as part of their life for the rest of their lives.
What are your thoughts on where we go from here?
It's interesting. I wrote a paper that I presented to the executive committee at the club here that was about four thousand words that was essentially the state of the golf business and particularly how it relates to Essex and my life and our team's lives. And that was six months before the club pro crisis. Article came out. That came out, and the club president here sent that article to me and said, you beat them to the punch, But I think a lot of us beat them to
the punch, right. It was an amazing article. It was I can't tell you the chatter that that created, But now that chatter's gone. Or at least certainly muted compared to where it was. I've been listening to your podcast, and I think that everyone has really good points. It's an odd situation that the PGA of America, while advocating
for us, isn't our bosses. They're not our bosses, right, So any gains that I might get at essex, whether it relates to my own situation or my team situation or facilities, whatever those might be, that doesn't necessarily help the professional next door. Right. There is no union, there's no guild there. We have to fight these battles, if you will, very quote fight these battles on a million
different fronts every day. So I think it's the more that we talk to one another, the more that our members. Again I work at a member on club, so the more that our members and the board here are hearing these situations, the better. In general, what I've seen is that when they are made aware of a problem, they're very empathetic and they want act. I think a lot of the problems that the golf business is facing, some of them are institutional problems, like people play golf on
the weekends, people play golf on holidays. We've got to figure out a way that me the head pro. I don't need to be here on every weekend and every holiday. But there are some things that are kind of intrinsic
with the golf business. But I think if we can communicate with data and eloquence to the people who are making decisions, whether it's a membership and ownership group, aboard, whatever it is, they want to help us, they do, But for generations, I don't think that they knew what the problems were, and I think there was a badge of honor how many hours a week could work. So if we as golf professionals were saying, my seventy five hours weeks be to your seventy, and I must be
a better head pro. If that was the culture, as Chandler as alluded to, how are our bosses going to be there to help us if we're bragging about how much you work? And now I want to do the other way around. I want to be the head process I work forty hours a week and then tell my friends how I can do that. Now I'm far from that, but we've got to fight these battles on every single little front, and we've got to be honest with our bosses, and we have to be honest with ourselves.
The next generation, do you see that there might be more of you coming and staying and pursuing a position like you've You've worked hard to get and are immersed in.
As we speak, I think my generation as I'm sure every previous generation thinks. I think my generation. I'm thirty five. I think we're kind of the flex point because a lot of my peers and friends, people within a few years of me. We were able to learn from the greats, the Jack Druges, the Tony Pancakes, the Scott and Ies, the Bob Fords. We saw what the classic great American golf pro looked like. And now we're seeing the interns that I'm hiring, who are eighteen to twenty two, and
my young assistant's fresh out of school. We're seeing the golf business through their perspective. But we were trained in a much different perspective. So I think what I'm trying to do is be the connection from those greats, if we can call them that, those greats, and translate and modernize the golf business to make it attractive for someone who's twenty two, make it attractive for me, because I don't want again at thirty five, I hopefully have a
long career ahead of me. But sustainability is important because I would say the work life balance that I have now, I can't do this for twenty five more years. So but I've taken the viewpoint of I'm going to try and make get better. I'm going to try to be part of the change, even if it's in my own little world, in my facility, and make the younger interns and assistants feel like there is hope and change and progress happening, because I I'd rather give myself and my family.
My wife's a golf professional who works here with us. I'd rather give us a chance here than say it's never going to change and bail if that makes sense, totally yeah, And I consider myself one of them, very lucky. I work at a great club, very comfortable. I'm one of the lucky ones. And we say to ourselves all the time, how how could this be possible if you weren't in some of the positions we're in.
Do you and your wife have kids?
No? And that's yeah. We own the golf shop here together, which is a great benefit for us. But my dog's in the golf shop. My whole life is here, and as we think about the next step in our lives, there's certainly that how does that happen? And unfortunately I haven't worked for many people that have kids or have I need better examples I would say on how to handle that because I can't be an absent father. I don't think that having kids because that's what you're supposed to do is fair to people.
You hopeful.
I am hopeful because A I have a partner in this in my wife. That makes me feel even more invested and more support. I'm also hopeful because of where I specifically work, because I do have a wonderful membership and in general a lot of empathy. How far can I push what this position is? I don't know. But the same way that I presented a paper to the board a few years ago it said we can't continue
down this road. We made progress from that. We really did my staff salaries, the size of my team has grown. We are making progress. But this can't be at the club or any club can't think that what they did the last two years to make it better is it as I'm sure every industry needs to think about it. I'm hopeful. I'm not jumping for joy overly optimistic, but I'm hopeful, and it's worth it. It's worth fighting for it.
There might be a day where twenty years from now, you are that head pro that's been at your club for thirty five years or whatever, and you had an impact on making sure that that twenty two year old intern that you have now as a path to having that same type of Bob Ford Jack druga Tony pancake situation. Right, That's possible.
That's the hope. I mean, there's nothing. I had an assistant pro, Alex Hoyos, who became a head pro in Essex County Country Club, Funny Nothing, Jersey. Those are the proudest days really in a head pro's life is when an assistant who works for them becomes a head pro on their own. That's a really proud day. And you hope to have a roster of those. But you've got to be there a long time and you've got to
be at a great facility to make that happen. So again, hopeful, certainly hopeful, But seven years in, I don't know if I've got another thirty years At this rate of work and life, work life balance because as you mentioned, you say, you know that those people are known for making great assistant professionals into head professionals. Those people are also known for being great husbands and fathers and active in their
community and coaching their kids' sports leagues. And that's got to be just as important us because being completely devoted to your craft and devoted to your club, while great for the club, might not be the most healthy thing for the individual.
Safe to say, Essex County Club, his staff, and the industry in general are lucky to have Jack Davis, not to mention his wife, Amanda Davis, who graduated from the PGM program at Mississippi State in twenty thirteen, worked for Peter Malar and was an assistant at Friar's Head on Long Island. Amanda has been at Essex for six years and has agreed to be part of episode seven, a wrap up, which will include several more voices based on everything they've heard throughout this series. But for now, it's
back to doctor Bryan Soulet. Rick Riley actually said, look, professional golfers tend to be takers. Club pros, PGA pros are givers. What are your thoughts on that? Kind of summary of the two separate sort of paths of the professional game of golf.
Yeah, nothing's black or white, right. You know, you watch anything about the top level players, they're trying to get back in any way they can. But I think if you're going to be again a traditional golf professional working at a public course or at a resort or at a private club, you have to care about other people.
Your job is to make people happy every day, and so you and your staff better be ready and better have everything in place to deliver great programming to make sure that when people show up, like when you go to Abandon Dune's right, I know that's your happy place. It's not just the golf courses, right, it's seeing Shoo when you arrive, and it's spending time in the golf shops talking with the golf professionals and then spending all
those hours with the caddies. I mean, that's what the profession is all about, is making it so that this trip that you've been looking forward to for two years, that you've been saving for for ten years, is everything that you wanted it to be. And a lot of times it comes down to the people. Because the golf
course is going to be great no matter what. So yeah, I think I think golf professionals, the really good ones, have a great way with people, a great way of making them feel special, whether it's in the golf shop or on the lesson tee or going out and playing some golf with them. And that's you know, that's what we try to nurture, is help people kind of learn some interpersonal skills so that when they get into the industry they can make somebody's day.
This work life balance that may have been an issue pre COVID certainly became an issue during COVID. And now that golf is you know, continues to stay popular, and we've got this rise in energy around not only green grass facilities, but you know sort of non traditional golf facilities, women, kids. You know, everything is going in the right direction. Meanwhile, the club pro or the PGA pro, you know, it was sort of like run over. I mean they were
just just or held held underwater. I talk about like sort of like paddling out, you know, in a Hawaiian surf break, and it's like it just feels like the club pros just can't get past the break to breathe again. Where are we at in your mind here as you sit you know, you know eight essentially April twenty twenty three.
I think that article was big right last year, the club pro crisis. I think that put a spotline on the challenges of the industry. I think club owners, boards of directors, PGA of America leadership, USGA leadership. I think they all saw that and took it to heart because there was a pretty good good outcry and social media outcry after that. What I've seen in the past five years or so, and I think this came obviously pre pandemic. It was kind of status quo pandemic. It was every
man for yourself, try to survive. And then I think post pandemic, what we're starting to see is golf facilities and golf professionals who realized that they were getting burnout, they were getting people dropping out of the industry and going into different professions. They had to make some changes. So we're starting to see different models. So there's one model that Jim Smith at Philly Cricket Club has and that is all of his part time employees are for
ten to twelve hour shifts per week. You get three days off per week, but they're still putting in fifty hours, right, I'd call that balance, you know, when you're talking about the industry. So it's a pretty cool model. And there's other clubs that have upped their budget for personnel and they've got more assistant golf profession now than they ever have before with the goal.
Of it being a more normal work week.
Because I think the new generation and the students who were teaching everybody here at Penn State and all the other universities, they're seeing the industry and they're saying, all right, you know, do I want to be there fifty sixty seventy hours a week and remember guest week you're going to be that's just inevitable. But are there some facilities that are going to offer something a little bit more more balanced. Yeah, And if those facilities are doing that,
that's where the students are going to go. And if you're not doing that, eventually you're going to be left in the dust. So I'm pretty excited about it because I think I think there's no way golf facilities can't adapt at this point, especially with all those leaders making some changes.
To this point. In my reporting, which started in October of last year, I've interviewed fourteen people for this podcast series. I've heard from at least fifty more who are or were PGA pros. I'd estimate half of that sample set have left their post as pros or assistant pros for an alternate industry.
This is the tragedy of when this happens in the golf business, right. We see people who go into the industry and they have such promise and such charisma and such skill, and they get into that whitewater. They can't get past the break, as you say, and they get out of the industry. And these are the people who we were most excited about being leaders, and they just get They have a moment where they sit down with their spouse and they say, is this worth it? Is
there another option for us now? And that's where if we don't see a change in the industry, I think we're going to have more of these casualties. And I hope the hell it doesn't happen, you know. I hope that that these you know, the young talent is able to find the balance that they need to be really good at what they do, get all the fulfillment, but then be able to go home at night and throw the ball with their kid, you know, and not miss
every dance recital in every game. And I think that there's a path now for that, and I'm, like I said earlier, I'm optimistic about it.
I really am.
So essentially it was it was an awareness issue, and by virtue of a Shane Ryan article social media, you know, idiots like me saying what I said and how I said it, which then causes another wave of kind of of education, you know, I mean seriously, I mean, yeah, you know, I here here. I've been in the golf industry for decades, you know, and I just I just wasn't aware of just you know, the how bad it had gotten. And that to me was exactly like so that to me was an exclamation point on the idea
that this literally wasn't awarenesses awareness issue. You have selfless, humble givers of the game that aren't good at promoting themselves or pounding their chest. You know, look at guys like Bob Ford or Rick Riley or some of these other names that you've talked about. They're not going around, like, you know, honking their own horns.
It's just not happening.
So so that awareness is you had in your mind is being addressed and that's why you feel so positive and excite quote excited about it.
Yeah.
And I'll say one other thing, and this may upset some folks, but that's okay. Fifty five percent of PGA professionals are fifty five years or older. So there's an old school mentality that I think was perpetuated forever in this industry. And I'm hoping that that that the changing of the guard allows for the younger generation of PG professionals to say, you know what, the way we've always done it isn't right. We need to change it. And
I'm excited for that. I think that that you're seeing some young minds come into the industry that are that are fighting for, you know, for some more balance.
I think that's a really good thing.
Seth waw, what are your thoughts on him? His involvement, his impact and uh and and sort of you know how he's how he's addressed, you know, trying to address a quality of life issue for his membership.
I've been through I think at this point it's three or four CEOs the PGA of America. Seth has been one of the more exciting ones that seems to seems to have the better interest of PG professionals at front of mind rather than the bottom line of the PGA
of America. And I've I've really enjoyed his leadership. I think the thing that's that's interesting about the setup of the PGA, Right, You've got your your executives, but then you also have your board of directors who are the PGA members, right, And so it's an interesting balance between leading the ship of this massive organization PJ of America, but then also working with your board of directors, you know, and and the individuals who are in charge of that.
So John Linder, Don Rey, Nathan Charns, those are the three who are in charge right now. And that's kind of with each president. There's something new that I think each president's going to fight for. I think Seth Wills done a really good job of balancing his different roles. It's been it's been great under his leadership.
Susie Whyley, I was what a game changer? Game changer?
Yeah, a force of nature.
M I've always been a fan, you know, I've crossed paths with her from time to time, interviewed her and she just jumps off the screen. I mean she is like, she is relentlessly motivated to make changes in pathways for females, girls, for the game in general. I was like, what can I do to support whatever it is that you're doing.
I mean, what unbelievable, right, And to see like the change of perception once she was president of the PJ of America of the role that women play in the game of golf and the opportunities for women in golf.
We see it at the university, right, because we get women who come through our program and I receive calls and emails weekly saying we need a really strong woman to join our program for X, Y or Z. Right, there's such a demand for women in this industry to take roles that that have opportunities to just explode and just you know, create such a great career. Susie was was such an advocate, always will be an advocate for women in the game of golf, for different individuals from
different backgrounds and minorities. And I think because of her presidency and because of her leadership, we're starting to see an uptick in international students, students from different backgrounds women.
Thank God for her.
Next up, Susie.
Wayley, you know men are still the employers at most clubs back and people typically hire who they look like, right, And we need more women promoted, We need more women elevated, and we need more clubs to think about women running their facilities, not just as general managers, but in head golf offs positions and directors of golf.
That's not a lot.
We have some, you know, we have some directors and instructions at high end clubs. Joanna cos at Marion, Kathy Kim's at Baltimore. I mean we were, you know, little by little, you're starting to see those opportunities happen. We have gms that are females, but it's it's woefully, woefully and painfully behind.
Put another log on the fire. Nobody here is gift and tie