Christina Bender

Christina Bender symbolizes the future of the turf industry.

Bender is a senior at Penn State University and she already has some impressive lines on her résumé: A resident of Horsham, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, she interned two summers at Merion Golf Club before spending this past summer at The Union League National Golf Club in southern New Jersey. She has also volunteered at the last two U.S. Women’s Opens.

Bender wasn’t planning on a career in turf when she enrolled at Penn State. But she’s always had an aptitude for science.

“Going into college, I didn’t even know that turfgrass science was an option,” she told Rick Woelfel on the Wonderful Women of Golf podcast. “But I was determined to stay on that science track. My sister majored in chemistry in college and I always liked being in labs. I like learning about all that kind of stuff, doing experiments. My senior year [of high school], I was taking AP chemistry and AP environmental. Those were my favorite classes.”

Bender’s own interest in chemistry was inspired by Anthony Adamucci, one of her teachers at Hatboro-Horsham High School.

“He taught chemistry in a way that it wasn’t scary anymore,” Bender recalls. “That kind of inspired me to stick on that science path, just the way that he taught.”

Bender entered her freshman year at Penn State as a general science major, with her specific career path still to be determined.

“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do because I also really enjoyed environmental science,” she says. “I ended up taking a few chemistry classes and biology classes. What kind of got me into turf, honestly, was I was sitting in all the lecture classes that freshmen sit in, and realized I don’t like sitting still.’”

On the advice of her advisor, Bender signed up for a one-credit turf class — “about spraying and calibrating and all that,” she says. That course proved to be a jumping-off point for Bender, who spent the following summer on the West Course at Merion.

“I’d never raked a bunker, I’d never mowed a green, I’d never done any of that,” she says. “I took that summer to learn the very, very basic level of what it takes to be on a golf course.”

When she returned to Penn State, Bender’s schedule was, in her words, “packed with turf credits.”

The following May, she was on hand at the U.S. Women’s Open before returning to Merion to spend her summer working the renowned East Course with a new outlook.

“I went back to the East Course to work and I started noticing all those finer details I didn’t necessarily look at my first year, because I wasn’t aware of the importance of everything,” she says.

Bender found her level of self-confidence rising as she spent more time in the field.

“I think, at the very beginning of my career, doing bunkers every day, I was scared of the boss,” she says. “Not because they were scary but because it’s the big boss. And then, as I got more of, ‘I know what this means and ‘I know what I’m doing,’ I definitely felt a different kind of confidence through me. It wasn’t so much, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing,’ but more, ‘What they’re doing, I want to know.’ I think that helped me feel more comfortable communicating with my managers.”

Bender says that she gained plenty of confidence in her work during her second year on the East Course — and during her second U.S. Women’s Open.

“It was an incredible experience both times,” she says. “I would absolutely do it again. You don’t work with a whole lot of women, at least I haven’t. … There are all these other females in the industry who are passionate about the same things around you. Some of my best friends to this day I met at that tournament.”