Golfdom Report: 21 at last

Staying home or staying on the course

Though many respondents reported a record number of rounds played in 2020, when asked on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being difficult) how hard it was to maintain a full crew, more than half reported a 4 or 5 in 2020.

The perennial problem continues to hold true: Finding people who are willing to work for the pay is a big barrier to hiring in the golf industry. With the added challenge of the pandemic, several superintendents cite unemployment and stimulus checks as a reason they were unable to get people out of their homes to come work on a golf course.

Jennifer Torres, golf course superintendent at Westlake Golf and Country Club in Jackson, N.J., is in that camp.

“2020: The year of free money and staying home!” Torres says. “It was challenging to find people who wanted to work for what we could afford to pay them — many were making more on unemployment.”

She hired five people this year, but it took a while to get them up to speed, and the short-staffed crew was unable to pay extra attention to the details on the course.

“It’s always been a struggle,” she says. “I don’t know how we fix it because they can flip burgers for the same amount of money to get up at 4:30 in the morning and work in the freezing cold.”

At the peak of the season, including Torres and the mechanic, about 10 people comprise the Westlake crew. She currently doesn’t have an assistant superintendent, but her crew includes people she can rely on, including her mentor and her 20-year-old son.

Graph: Golfdom Staff

“Take care of the people you have,” she says. “I go out of my way to make people feel like this isn’t just a job, we’re a family, and tell them how important their job really is.”

Timothy Garceau, superintendent of Haworth (N.J.) Country Club, also had a smaller crew this year.

But, unlike Torres, management asked Garceau to reduce his staff, though he had people who wanted to come back and work. He had a skeleton crew of nine at the end of June, with 13 people at the peak of the season, down from 19. His assistant quit at the end of August, too.

That meant getting creative by executing maintenance plans earlier and enlisting the pro shop staff to help move tee markers in the morning.

He says that moving tee times back 45 minutes, less bunker maintenance and rolling greens less frequently helped labor.

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