Max Claassen grows as Oakmont Country Club evolves.
An Iowan who relishes sports and duck hunting, he’s chatting about the Hawkeyes while walking the club’s celebrated and severely sloped first fairway on a brisk mid-March morning.
A red-tailed hawk forcefully flies above the fairway and stops atop a tree separating Oakmont from Hulton Road. Claassen ignores the aerial predator. His hawk-like eyes gaze down at prized bentgrass/Poa annua playing surfaces exiting dormancy and ahead toward co-workers maintaining front-nine holes across the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The beginning of the walk-and-talk with Claassen resembles the past seven years of his life: intently focused on executing his role to boost a team seeking to achieve agronomic excellence.
He migrated from Cedar Rapids, hoping to learn more about elite turfgrass maintenance. His role has expanded, from intern, to a full-time crew member whom then-superintendent Dave Delsandro thought was still in school, to an agronomist, to assistant superintendent, then to director of agronomy.
Oakmont, like Pittsburgh, the city 13 miles to the southwest, possesses a distinct lingo an outsider doesn’t understand until asking an insider what specific terms mean. An agronomist is Oakmont nomenclature for an assistant-in-training; the director of agronomy is second-in-command under Mike McCormick, whose business-card title is grounds superintendent. McCormick elevated Claassen to director of agronomy in 2023.
Claassen adores the determined people and varied terrain found at Oakmont. He estimates he’s returned to Iowa only a half-dozen times since joining the Oakmont team. “You have to make sacrifices,” he says. “I found that out pretty early. Your ability is defined by your availability.” Life is good, despite the 700 miles between his adult and childhood homes. He met his fiancée at Oakmont, and he will be on many clubs’ short list of head superintendent candidates following the 2025 U.S. Open.
When other clubs pluck Oakmont-developed talent for management roles — a regular occurrence in the golf industry — the solution to filling the departed’s role almost always resides within. Claassen’s likely replacement is one of his current co-workers. “That’s what Oakmont’s about,” he says. “We’re promoting from within.”
A club might not employ dozens of golf maintenance employees, support a robust internship program, own eight sprayers or boast international visibility stemming from regularly hosting U.S. Opens. But every club must construct a crew capable of meeting or exceeding stakeholder expectations.
Plenty can be gained from discovering how Oakmont builds its high-achieving team.
Grant Cushman unspools thin red rope used to separate a thinly shaved approach from an even more minutely polished surface while Simon Richalot rolls the 15th green near the end of the brisk March workday. Cushman then moves to the left of the deep green with front-to-back and back-to-front slopes. Sun peeps through the clouds above the 507-yard par 4, and Cushman begins talking again about beloved work topics: Oakmont’s culture and team.
“One thing I forget to mention,” he says, “is that none of us have four-year turf degrees.” The “us” includes the triumvirate of Cushman, Claassen and Justin Kysely, Oakmont’s three assistant superintendents.
A golf enthusiast who developed into a scratch player as a teenager, Cushman received a job with a few friends on the crew at The Quarry at Crystal Springs, an affordable public course in suburban St. Louis. The teenagers enjoyed the work, and their bosses appreciated the labor pipeline they generated. “We loved golf,” Cushman says, “and we loved making the course better. We gave the owner and the superintendent enough guys for them to make changes to the course.”
His post-graduation plans featured a nice tune: Cushman enrolled at Southern University Illinois Edwardsville to study jazz performance. In addition to dropping birdies in bunches in high school, Cushman hit numerous soothing trumpet notes. Halfway through his freshman year, he discovered he was spending more time at the golf course, working and playing, than in class. “I thought to myself: What am I doing?” Cushman says.
He later discovered he was preparing for a golf career. Cushman enrolled in the State Technical College of Missouri, a two-year school with a commercial turf and grounds management program. He applied for internships at multiple renowned clubs, including Oakmont. Delsandro contacted Cushman late in the search process. “I called my stepdad, and he basically told me I’m an idiot if I don’t go there,” Cushman says.
Cushman arrived at Oakmont on a blustery, late-spring day coinciding with the commencement of aerification week, a demanding process to prepare surfaces for the brutality of the peak golf and maintenance seasons. On his first morning, Cushman remembers Delsandro, an uber-intense figure, bursting through the breakroom doors and telling him to grab a bucket. The crew needed another hand and curious mind to assist with a drill and fill.
“I told him I didn’t know what a drill and fill is,” Cushman says. “He goes, ‘You’re about to find out real quick.’ It was 2½ days of chucking sand over my shoulders and into the hopper from sunup to sundown.” Cushman then spent the next 2½ days walking all 18 fairways, slowly dragging a ProCore 648 aerator. “I had a hell of a first week,” Cushman adds. “After that was done, I had blisters all over my feet. I still showed up the next day. Everybody might have looked at me a little bit different.”
Cushman’s Oakmont origin story proves no formal education prepares somebody for their first trying moment upon joining a new team. The following year, after graduating from State Tech, Cushman rejoined the Oakmont crew as a full-time agronomist and has steadily ascended the ranks. “Out of nowhere some assistants start leaving for other jobs and you’re asked to become one,” he says. “You don’t know if you’re ready, but you have to take that leap and realize that you are ready.”
Cushman shares an office — and hundreds of in-the-Oakmont-field lessons — with Claassen and Kysely, who also own two-year degrees.
Claassen attended Kirkwood Community College while working at Cedar Rapids Country Club. Once he settled on turf as a career, Claassen selected Kirkwood’s two-year program instead of enrolling in Iowa State’s Department of Horticulture, which offers four-year degrees in turfgrass management and landscape design. “I was 21 and wanted to get on with my career,” Claassen says. “The two-year program really appealed to me.”
Kysely was close to obtaining a four-year accounting degree, having completed nearly three years of classes at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. An internship with an accounting firm led to him rethinking his future.
“I couldn’t stand sitting behind a desk,” Kysely says. “You’ll meet a lot of guys out here that started in finance or have business backgrounds and then end up switching to turf.”
A native of Helenville, Wisconsin, a 238-resident, no-stoplight community between Milwaukee and Madison, Kysely grew up on his parents’ Christmas tree farm, played golf at 13-hole Jefferson Golf Course and worked for a local lawncare company. His high school golf coach referred him to a connection at Erin Hills, site of the 2017 U.S. Open and 2025 U.S. Women’s Open. Kysely was 21 when he worked on a golf course for the first time.
“I had no idea what I was getting into. I remember seeing the guys at Erin Hills throwing sand on greens, I was absolutely baffled. It was like, ‘Why are we throwing sand on the greens?’”
Kysely relished the work, and Erin Hills superintendent Zach Reineking suggested he consider Penn State’s two-year turfgrass management program. A Penn State Turf Club call with Delsandro introducing Oakmont’s culture and passion persuaded Kysely to apply for an internship at the club.
“Unlike most interns, I never had a visit before I started,” Kysely says. “I just applied, and I showed up. I arrived on a Sunday and my first day was Monday. I had never been to Pittsburgh. I kind of fell in love with the city and fell in love with the golf course.”
Western Pennsylvania became Kysely’s official home when he joined the Oakmont crew in a full-time capacity following graduation in 2022. McCormick promoted him to an assistant superintendent role last year.
Three versatile assistants primed to become head superintendents. No four-year turf degrees among them.
“The industry is changing,” McCormick says. “I don’t think it matters as much anymore if you have a turf certificate, or a two-year degree, or a four-year degree, or a master’s degree. I can’t think of an instance where something popped up on the course and I go, ‘What did I learn at UMass? It’s, ‘What did I learn in the field at this point in time in my career?’”
Perhaps the solution to your course’s assistant superintendent conundrum also resides within your current team.
“The unique thing about Oakmont — and this dates back decades — we’re the only place I can think of this way where we’ve hired from within for decades,” McCormick adds. “Nearly every assistant that has been here, including myself and Dave Delsandro, started here as interns. And if they didn’t start here as interns, they started as crew guys and worked their way through the staff. By the time they get into that assistant role, they know the culture, they know the expectations, they know the agronomic procedures.”
Jack Stiglitz represents an Oakmont anomaly: he earned a four-year degree and studied the same subject the entire time at NC State. His formal turfgrass science training helps him manage an operation comparable to a small business.
Stiglitz is Oakmont’s spray technician. He spends chunks of his days inside the club’s Integrated Pest Management facility. The structure houses eight retrofitted riding sprayers with stainless steel tanks, modern mixing, loading and washing systems, and hundreds of boxes, jugs, pallets and bags storing dozens of unique chemistries.
Classroom topics fascinate Stiglitz. After learning his summer job on the crew at 54-hole Prestonwood Country Club in Cary, North Carolina, could be parlayed into a golf maintenance career, Stiglitz enrolled at NC State. He never wavered on his major.
“It was a big thing for me to have a four-year degree,” he says. “If your end goal is to be a superintendent, there’s nothing really showing that a four-year degree puts you over the edge. However, when I was asking around about the career, I would hear if you wanted to be a director of agronomy or something more than a superintendent on the business side of turf, having a four-year degree could set you up.”
His first internship, at Pikewood National, a modern golf maintenance marvel in Morgantown, West Virginia, further positioned Stiglitz for future success and led to him establishing a connection with Delsandro and Oakmont. He joined the Oakmont team as an intern following his sophomore year at NC State. He returned to Oakmont for another internship following his junior year.
“I just fell in love with the operation,” Stiglitz says. “I was convinced then — and I’m still convinced — this is the peak of golf course maintenance.”
Working at a Goliath means grasping every imaginable job. Early training is broad, with interns and other newcomers exposed to all aspects of the operation. Grit comes before specialization, but defined roles for individuals emerge. That’s why Stiglitz holds a job empowering him to make decisions on how to treat acclaimed turf. His role as Oakmont’s spray tech allows him to establish relationships with researchers, product distributors and manufacturer representatives. McCormick trusts Stiglitz to strengthen partnerships — and playing surfaces.
“Starting here as an intern and turf guy, they want you to learn the agronomic side and I always took to spraying,” says Stiglitz, who joined Oakmont as a full-time agronomist upon graduating from NC State in 2022. “I was always the guy out there spraying, so when this came up, it made sense for me to fill this position.”
How Stiglitz views his role epitomizes the commitment to excellence permeating the crew.
“At the risk of sounding vain,” he says, “you can’t overstate the importance of Integrated Pest Management on a property, especially one like Oakmont.”
The space where equipment manager Ian Christy and his assistant, Chris Palacki, repaired and tuned equipment expected to provide world-caliber playing conditions now serves as the golf maintenance breakroom. The space where the duo stored parts to fix that equipment now serves as the staff kitchen.
An indoor facility transition during the winter of 2022-23 shifted Christy and Palacki to a larger work home — and moved the entire crew into a spacious gathering area. The Oakmont team performed the bulk of the maintenance facility makeover in-house. “It was nuts for two years trying to find stuff,” Christy deadpans, “but we made do.”
Christy envisioned a career involving taming kitchen mayhem. His parents, Gary and Marylene, owned Christy’s Coffee Shop, a full-service restaurant in Natrona Heights, a municipality 12 miles northeast of Oakmont. Christy knew nothing about the famous golf course nearby. He wanted to be a chef. He eventually became a chef at a local restaurant despite no formal culinary schooling.
But the restaurant business is more volatile than even the golf business. Christy found himself scrambling when ownership shuttered the restaurant. He had two options: accept a position at one of the owners’ other ventures or apply for unemployment. Christy concocted a third option and enrolled in heavy diesel mechanic school. While attending classes, he gave his résumé to multiple people, including his wife, Jessica, an Oakmont clubhouse assistant. The résumé reached the hands of a club official. “And that day they called me,” Christy says. “My wife didn’t know that I got an interview.”
Christy landed at Oakmont in 2009 working outdoors and developing his small-engine repair skills under legendary equipment manager Herb Berg. When Berg retired in 2015, one year before Oakmont hosted its ninth U.S. Open, Christy possessed the experience and acumen to lead the maintenance of an increasingly advanced equipment fleet operated by a rapidly evolving crew of turf professionals.
“I like not doing the same thing every day. I don’t do the same thing every day here,” Christy says. “My wife wanted me to move on to somewhere else, but I thought Herb was going to be leaving sometime soon, and I’ll see what happens. And here I am.”
Oakmont had Berg’s replacement waiting inside its shop. The club internally developed one of the industry’s toughest-to-fill positions. Christy now imparts his knowledge on Palacki.
McCormick notes the mechanic’s room is four times larger than the space where employees now gather and eat. But principles demonstrated in the old Oakmont shop still resonate. A pay-it-forward, fill-roles-from-within philosophy keeps equipment humming.
Sometimes an individual wants to be a part of something so badly they send a stranger images of their yard.
Western Pennsylvania native Dan Jantzi played hockey as a child and teenager. Pittsburgh, after all, is the land of Lemieux, Jagr and Crosby, making hockey a popular athletic pursuit. Golf is also popular in western Pennsylvania among what Jantzi calls “washed-up” hockey players. Sweet hockey swipes evolve into solid golf swings. Plus, the cool-weather calendar aligns beautifully for hockey players looking to play golf during their off-season.
Living somewhere warmer than Pittsburgh — Raleigh, North Carolina — for 15 years solidified Jantzi’s golf passion. He worked multiple golf jobs in North Carolina, first as a cart attendant at Devil’s Ridge Golf Club, then on the crew at Prestonwood Country Club and finally in the Stitch Golf warehouse. When life brought him back to western Pennsylvania, he knew immediately where he wanted to work. “As a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, with the history behind Oakmont and everything, I always dreamed that I would be here someday,” Jantzi says.
Hiring Jantzi as a full-time crew member required no recruiting or outreach. He received McCormick’s number from a mutual acquaintance. Jantzi wasn’t shy about contacting the superintendent.
“Long story short,” he says, “I bothered Mike for two months. One or two times a week I would send him a text message about how I wanted to come to Oakmont and how I would bust my ass when I got there. I sent him pictures and videos of my yard all striped out. Eventually, after me bothering the hell out of him for such a long period of time, he gave me a shot. And the rest is history.”
Jantzi tells his Oakmont origin story while removing ryegrass patches from the Poa annua/bentgrass approach fronting the third green, the hole with the revered Church Pew fairway bunkering. The task is arduous, as it requires prolonged hunching to identify and pluck undesirable turfgrass species from the earth. Jantzi spends the entire brisk March day methodically cleansing approaches. His tools include a bucket and a knife.
“You have to love it,” he says. “I love being here every day. I tell people, ‘I don’t feel anxious about going to work.’ I don’t feel like there are any times where it’s, ‘I have to go to work tomorrow.’ It’s very easy to get out the door.”
Jantzi adds he’s not a “huge fan of school,” but he’s mulling enrolling in a turfgrass certificate program. His persistence — and McCormick’s willingness to reply to some unusual text messages — proves the possibilities when a manager gives a dreamer a chance. Jantzi is in his third season at Oakmont. He’s part of the glue that keeps a high-achieving team together.
As he rolls the 15th green on a day whose temperature evokes reminders of his childhood surroundings, it might be understandable if Richalot’s mind wanders. His past is meandering; his future is immense.
A native of the French Alps and a second-generation industry professional, he’s already stacked his résumé with recognizable course names: France’s Evian Resort, Switzerland’s Golf Club de Genève and Golf Club du Domaine Impérial, Ireland’s Adare Manor, Australia’s Kingston Heath, the Caribbean’s Cabot Saint Lucia, and Florida’s Streamsong Resort. Any of the above locales can be viewed as more glamorous than western Pennsylvania.
To the select few in any industry, grit matters more than glamour. Richalot is one of those people in the golf industry. He’d rather roll a wind-exposed green with no golfers around on a chilly afternoon than stare into majestic mountains or clear seas. His 2024 internship experience at Oakmont convinced him to accept an agronomist position at the club upon graduating from Penn State’s two-year program in March. Competition for somebody with Richalot’s blend of talent, passion and experience is fierce.
Why did he pick an agronomist position at Oakmont over nearly every open assistant superintendent job on the planet?
“Everyone here understands it’s not about us,” Richalot says. “It’s bigger than us. We’re all working at a golf course that has been here for more than 100 years. Everyone before us worked hard, and we’re trying to be in the same position as them.”
Helping Oakmont surpass enormous expectations requires accepting regular staff turnover.
Only three members of the nearly 50-employee crew were on the staff when the club hosted the 2016 U.S. Open. Building a high-achieving team means realizing motivated talents from elsewhere like Claassen, Kysely, Cushman, Stiglitz and Richalot will eventually leave to fulfill career ambitions. They collaborate every day with full-time crew members, most of whom hail from western Pennsylvania, to ensure their replacements own the attitude and aptitude to keep Oakmont thriving.
McCormick was that rising talent at one time, as he left Oakmont following the 2016 U.S. Open to accept the head superintendent job at New York’s Apawamis Club. Oakmont brought him back as grounds superintendent in 2022.
“We don’t have any secrets,” McCormick says. “It’s having that right attitude and buying into the culture here. The guys who work the hardest and put the most time in are the guys who advance at the most rapid rate. It’s just a dedication to doing whatever it takes to take this place to the next level.”
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