This month, Game Plan kicks off a three-part series on staffing for success. First in the series is a look at how the pandemic has changed staffing needs and why superintendents and managers should consider reorganizing their teams and redefining job descriptions. In parts two and three, we will look at finding, hiring and retaining the right team members and creating the culture that inspires and motivates top performers.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste” is a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill in the days following World War II. Scholars question whether Churchill ever spoke those exact words, but as we make tentative steps to emerge from a pandemic-induced crisis of our own time, the lesson it implies — finding opportunity amidst great difficulty and challenge — rings as timely and as relevant as it would have in Churchill’s day.

In the still-churning wake of the global health pandemic of 2020, maybe the first place we should look for opportunity is with our own staffs. As COVID-19 raced through communities across America, thousands of golf clubs and facilities found themselves on either side of a dilemma. For those places where golf was booming, stretching tee sheets, golf car fleets and maintenance staffs to their limits and beyond, the question was whether to staff up to handle the surge or stay with current staff levels, figuring the wave would eventually crest and return to some semblance of normal. For places the boom never reached, the questions were How long can we manage to keep our current team intact before payroll takes too much of a bite from dwindling revenues? And among those eventually let go, who will we bring back and who no longer has a place on our team?

By now, many of those calculations and decisions have been made and the ramifications felt. But the lessons they taught should not only endure, but also inform future staffing plans. In the heat of crisis, owners and managers learned who on their teams could take on more responsibility, who had leadership potential and who had reached their ceiling. They learned where they needed additional resources and where resources might be redeployed for better coverage and results. Now it’s time to put those lessons to work with redesigned organization charts and job descriptions.

One thing is for sure: a dynamic job market has changed even more in the last 12 months with continued disruption on the horizon. “The fallout will fundamentally change recruiting and hiring practices long after the pandemic has passed,” recruiting strategist Jack Whatley recently told Forbes.com.

Another certainty is that the war for talent will continue to escalate. Top performers will be in even greater demand because as businesses reshape themselves into leaner, more efficient operations, those top performers are the best value money can buy.

“Twenty years ago, all interns had mechanical skills and no computer knowledge. Now it is just the opposite. They all know how to operate computers, but they can’t change a spark plug,” says Rick Tegtmeier, the long-tenured and highly respected golf course superintendent at Des Moines Golf & Country Club. “It sure doesn’t hurt someone to work at a lesser-budget golf course operation and learn more of the skills that help you become a more rounded superintendent.”

There will never be a better time to take all the names off your org chart and rethink the needs of the club and course, the time and talent required of each of those needs, and the right names to place in those roles. As you go through that exercise, be aware that the pandemic and its economic reverberations have also changed employees’ perspectives.

Workers have had a lot of time recently to reevaluate their careers and question their next moves. Am I in the right job in the right industry? Where could I find more happiness and greater security for me and my family? Is this a stable environment and can I count on a stable paycheck? Where will I be exposed if (or when) another crisis emerges?

“Safety and job stability are at the top of mind for the job seeker now — and that changes what they want in a job,” Whatley says. “Businesses will have to become employee-centric as well as customer-centric.”

Hopefully, you and your facility have weathered this crisis without too much damage. Now’s the time to take advantage of an opportunity it has afforded.

I remember the moment I became attuned to issues of labor management. It was late on a Saturday afternoon on the North Side of Chicago and I was visiting a distinguished private club to speak at a dinner. We were touring the course after a rain shower and my host was telling me about how hard their veteran superintendent worked. Then we spotted him, alone and ankle deep in a water-filled bunker, shovel in hand with a drain hose nearby. “You see, there he is,” my host said. “He’s totally devoted to this place, never stops working.”

I politely acknowledged the comment while thinking to myself, “Here’s a superintendent who is completely disorganized and doesn’t know how to delegate.”

Labor management is all about organizing talent and allocating work efficiently and with respect. A person who takes on everything shows a disregard for themself and is set for failure through exhaustion. It’s also not best for the golf facility, because different people have different talents and one cannot be equally skilled at everything.

Superintendents owe it to themselves, their families, their employees and the club to allocate responsibility, organize tasks, mentor their crew and hire smart people who can learn. Among the telltale traits of a bad superintendent is hiring folks who are less than ideal so they can look good and excel only by comparison.

It’s complicated given the dearth of talent out there, declining turf school enrollments, and the general lack of experience and work ethic that many teens and twentiesomethings have to laboring in a business hierarchy. There’s a strong temptation to want to do everything oneself, but I recommend some alternative steps for success.

1. Know your own strengths

You can’t manage others unless you know yourself well. Every superintendent must have one core competence. It doesn’t matter if it’s turfgrass pathology, water chemistry, operating construction equipment or digital graphic skills. Always have a go-to skill you can build from and share with others. That sets a great example for others while providing a skill set you can fall back on in difficult times.

2. Hire smart people

The most successful executives surround themselves with folks who are smarter than they are and are not afraid to learn from them. By contrast, insecure leaders are afraid to be outshone and surround themselves with incompetents so they’ll look stronger by comparison but build nothing of value in the process.

3. Mentor

Set an example so that you instill in your subordinates the skill and confidence they will need to move up and out. Hire assistants you feel will be able to move into a head position after five to six years rather than keeping them for 20 years to cover for your deficiencies. This entails what’s known as “defeasible authority,” meaning you provide a model so that onetime subordinates can ultimately gain necessary ability and skills. Turf school might provide technical expertise but it never teaches the tact and diplomacy required in a business where you answer to people who think that because they are wealthy and powerful they are also knowledgeable — when they are completely ignorant.

4. Delegate

Let others learn, which also entails the risk that they might fail. There’s no other way to acquire the specific skills they will need — including cultivating their core competence. Take time to learn your employees’ hopes and aspirations and encourage them to acquire what it takes to achieve that while making it clear to them the golf course must be prepped on a daily basis.

5. Hire women

Recruit women, which automatically increases the potential employee pool. Forget the old canards about women not being physically up to the challenge or being distracted by other things. Given the competition for qualified help, expanding the applicant pool will provide you with a new coterie of folks eager to learn and prove themselves.

6. Convey respect

It is hard to pay people what they are really worth. Wages count, but there are other methods that go a long way to building loyalty and longevity. Keep in mind your crew’s cultural backgrounds, their various holidays and family traditions. If they need time off, be considerate. And when you need to defend against harassment — racial, sexual, religious — be scrupulous. That includes coming to employees’ defense against any discrimination by members and golfers. A zero-tolerance will go a long way toward conveying the respect employees deserve.

I think it is safe to say the State of the Industry survey following 2020 is more meaningful than it has been in years prior. I know I found the statistics from our facility to be eye-opening and hopefully I will learn from and use them to guide and shape future turf management decisions. Also, I hope the shot in the arm golf received from the pandemic continues to boost our beloved game as 2021 moves into spring.

Last year, rounds were up at our facility more than 27 percent compared to 2019. Our busiest month was April when we hosted 3,406 rounds. That was a 73.4 percent increase over April 2019. What makes those numbers even more outstanding is there were zero guest rounds and zero cart rounds. That’s right, April 2020 was walking only!

On top of that, April 2020 was our second-wettest month, with 7.24 inches of rainfall. Probably a good thing we were not permitting carts then as they all would have been stuck on the paths anyway. For the record, our walking rounds for the year were up 193 percent compared to 2019. The agronomy numbers from the State of the Industry shared this month show 36 percent of respondents stated handling cart wear and golfer traffic represented their biggest agronomic challenge, yet only 16 percent thought their course conditions were worse than in 2019.

We received numerous positive remarks about course conditions as the year progressed, and I always politely thanked folks for their sentiments even though I may have thought differently. When we allowed carts to return to the course in May, it was single-rider only and it stayed that way for the remainder of the year.

This brought numerous challenges to our head golf professional and his staff as the demand for play sometimes overwhelmed the supply of golf carts. As for how our course handled the traffic, the biggest thing I noticed was fairway definition was negatively impacted and reduced on the cart-path side of the hole vs. the other. Exit points did not require much mowing all year.

Forty-three percent of survey respondents rated bunkers as the No. 1 area that most suffered because of COVID-19 reductions, while a separate 43 percent said nothing suffered. I know at our facility the removal of bunker rakes meant there was more work for us to do each morning preparing the bunkers for daily play, but I did not hear much grumbling from players regarding the bunkers over the course of last year.

Only 11 percent of survey respondents said storms, flooding, wind or precipitation were their biggest agronomic challenge. I stated earlier that our busiest month was also one of our wettest. In fact, 2020 was the wettest year in my tenure and the wettest in Charlotte since 2003. We received just shy of 60 inches of rainfall in 2020 (59.71 inches) and the Queen City only averages about 42 inches!

This was the third consecutive year with more than 57 inches of rainfall and the yearly total is rising due to the increased number of large rain events, defined as more than one inch. It is not uncommon to find ourselves in the paths of tropical systems, but the past three years we have seen an increase in their frequency and magnitude. But it does not always have to be a tropical or named system to wreak havoc. In November, we had the third-largest single-day storm total in my tenure when more than four inches fell one morning due to an approaching cold front.

Back to our survey, the biggest challenge my crew faced last year was ... the crew! With COVID-19, there was always an apprehension about bringing someone new into our environment, but as spring turned into summer, the needs of the golf course won out. Locating, interviewing, hiring, training and retaining has become an industrywide challenge. Accomplishing those in a pandemic is the most difficult thing I have done in my career.

So, the year we all could not wait to end is in the rearview mirror and 2021 is no different in its early stages. We still do not have bunker rakes on the course and pool noodles still rest in the cups. Golf carts remain single-rider only and I am still trying desperately to keep my team safe.

But we now possess the experience from one year ago, and if we learned anything, I think it is that the turf can handle more than we previously thought. With a renewed sense of appreciation by our players for the game and the outdoor recreation it provides, maybe we can reduce some of that self-imposed pressure for perfection, because, after all, it’s just grass.

Golf courses, much like space and time, are a construct. We might glance at our scorecards or tee signs to check distances and pars, but there are no real boundaries. Each course can be whatever we want it to be.

Just ask Forrest Richardson.

“The game played 500 years ago, 400 years ago, 300 years ago and even 200 years ago didn’t look anything at all like today’s game,” says Richardson, owner of Forrest Richardson & Associates and the current president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. “Think for a minute that all the way up to the 1800s, there was no term golf course. It didn’t exist. There were no set number of holes. There weren’t any such things as fairways or greens, just holes dug in the ground. People started here or there. Holes could be 700 yards or 200 yards or 100 yards, and you could play till you quit or till the match was over. You might play 30 holes or 20 holes or eight holes.

“And the next day, a new band of people would come out and play a totally different route.”

The evolution of golf and the development of golf courses and their accompanying economies are welcome, but this current environment will not be permanent. There will be more change, and there is no time like the pandemic present to embrace it.

“In today’s world, where things move faster, my encouragement is that the game might make a leap even quicker to new things,” Richardson says. “Not to get rid of tradition, but there might be new ways to enjoy the game.”

The game might have never leaped forward more quickly than it did during 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sparked first lobbying, then adaptation from coast to coast. Three-quarters of respondents to our State of the Industry survey were forced to close at some point during the pandemic — 32 percent reported losing at least a month’s worth of potential revenue-producing days, and the mean and median closures were 22.5 days and 16.9 days, respectively — but the ideas that sprouted up and helped make courses recreational safe havens saved plenty of seasons and perhaps even some clubs. Heck, more than half our respondents reported their facility earned enough revenue just from golf to cover losses from food, beverage and events.

Golf boomed during the pandemic. Rounds increased more than 13 percent year over year through the end of November and quarterly equipment sales topped $1 billion from July through September — just the second time that figure has hit 10 digits and the first since right before the start of the Great Recession in 2008 — according to Golf Datatech. Rounds played last year decreased at only 8 percent of courses, according to our survey results, and among those courses that reported an increase, 56 percent said their jump was at least 20 percent.

THE TASTER PORTION

What can the industry do to hang on to all those new golfers, and to keep those existing golfers who visited the course more frequently during 2020 coming back just as often?

Consider what Jan Bel Jan calls “the taster portion.”

“Some of the golf facilities that have been most successful are the ones who have made decisions in the last four or five years to add forward tees, to create short-game areas, to create short courses or even a short golf course inside the practice range, who decided that family events were a good thing, and who decided to make the golf facility not just family-friendly but child-friendly — and when you make anything child-friendly you make it community-friendly,” says Bel Jan, owner of Jan Bel Jan Golf Course Design and the immediate past president of the ASGCA. “That goes a long way to people inviting a friend and engaging them in the game.”

Bel Jan and Richardson partnered in October to deliver a tremendous webinar on just that topic for PGA Show Connects, the virtual platform for the annual event, that is archived online. Watching or listening to “Where Do We Put All These New Golfers: Master Planning for the Present and Future” will be an hour well spent for anyone interested in the continued growth of the game.

“All the things we have been talking about for the last 15 years are very important,” Richardson says. “Flexible loops within golf courses — go play six holes, go play nine holes, go play 12 holes, pay by the golf hole — shorter courses, practice venues. The same holds true that if someone has more flexible time, they have more time to practice. If we’re getting more people to the course and our rounds are up, then our practice facilities need to be larger to accommodate more people. And I’ve always been an advocate for short courses.”

“There’s something to be said for the short courses, the nine-hole courses,” says Troon COO Bruce Glasco, whose company currently provides golf management services at nearly 600 locations and for more than 630 18-hole equivalent courses around the world. “There’s something to be said for the entertainment centers that got some kids to swing a club for the first time.”

Glasco cited Troon’s internal exit surveys when mentioning that, “10 or 15 years ago, golfers were more infatuated with the rankings of the courses and Augusta-type conditioning. The new generation of golfers is more concerned with who they’re playing with and the people they surround themselves with. It’s more about the experience. People like to be connected, and golf is one of those connectors. It allows you to put your phone down and spend a couple hours with friends. You can get some really valuable exercise, clear your head.

“There is just nothing like it. There is nothing like the game of golf. That’s why I remain so bullish on the future.”

EVERY MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD

And what about the future? 42 percent of our survey respondents said they expect another increase in rounds played at their facility this year, and another 43 percent said they expect the count to remain about the same.

Men still provide the most significant growth opportunity, with 43 percent of respondents saying that men ages 19 to 39 are the most important demographic for growth at their facility. Another 22 percent said men 40 and older are the most important demographic. Despite increased play by women and families last year, women 19 to 39 (15 percent), women 40 and older (10 percent) and children 18 and younger (9 percent) were all lower on the list.

“Across the board, all of those groups are important,” KemperSports CEO Steven Skinner says. “I do think there were a lot more women and families playing this year, and that was one of the more gratifying things to see this summer. But the biggest gap we had was 19 to 39, or however you define the millennial generation, because they weren’t playing.”

Skinner acknowledges he might be biased because his own children — Jack, 23, and Caroline, 21 — both started to play more last summer.

“We probably played 10 or 15 times this summer. We might have done that once before when they were 10 or 12,” says Skinner, who also played regular late-afternoon or early-evening nine-hole loops with his wife, Anne, throughout last summer. “Sometimes it takes that immersion into the game to get that bug. It’s fun to see and it’s one of the best things about the game.”

Women are a focus group for facilities around the country.

“When I look around our properties, it’s 90, 95 percent men,” says Sean McHugh, executive director of golf operations for the Cleveland Metroparks’ eight Northeast Ohio courses. “We’ve been trying to get women golfers to feel more comfortable for years. The other group is the younger generation. You have to grab them when they’re young and get them interested in the game. They may not stay with you the whole time, but I think they’ll come back to you eventually.”

Bel Jan, only the second woman to serve as ASGCA president after the late Alice Dye, recognizes important grassroots programs that have helped grow the game among women and younger golfers.

“Some of them have just been stellar,” she says, listing Operation 36, LPGA*USGA Girls Golf, PGA Jr. League and First Tee. “When you start seeing that 35 percent of the junior golfers are girls, and 10 years ago that number was 17 percent, that’s pretty remarkable.

“Golf courses do bring something to the entire community even if only — only — 10 percent of the community plays golf. But how many in that community play baseball or softball, or go bowling, or play tennis? To be able to understand that golf courses are contributing to the society and the environment is pretty important.”

In 2016, Bel Jan was at work on a course renovation in Naples, Florida that included the addition of forward tees — what she calls “scoring tees,” a term that is gender-, age- and skill-neutral.

“It took me a long time to come up with that name,” she says. “They’re not ladies’ tees. They’re not fast tees.” Why call forward tees “fast tees” when that term might put more pressure on, say, a 36-handicapper? “Golfers might say, ‘I can’t play fast so I won’t play at all,’” but everybody, Bel Jan says, wants to learn how to score — pars, birdies, maybe even an eagle here and there.

Forward or scoring tees can also encourage golfers with physical or mental challenges, Bel Jan says. She remembers a player at that Naples club who wore leg braces and had to drive a cart to every edge of the course to play. “The course was 5,100 yards and it was too long for him,” she says. “So he left the club and took a membership at a par 3 course. The guys he played with three or four times a week continued as a threesome.”

The green committee chair announced the addition of those new “scoring tees” that measured around 4,100 yards, “and he came back,” Bel Jan says. “He was there playing as a member. He wasn’t a member with a disability. He was a member. And that’s important. What you’re going to see, what I’ve been working on for 10, 15 years, is that people with disabilities are potential customers, and they’re a significant group of potential customers. … This is a trend I believe you’ll see.”

The potential audience for the game is only as limited as we think it is.

“It’s up to us as operators to make sure we keep those individuals engaged and excited about the sport so it becomes a generational sport for families,” Glasco says. “We’re so fortunate we can play from age 6 to age 100, and when we’re passionate about it, we can pass it on and it can become a generational gift.”

“That’s what golf is about, being out with your son or your daughter, playing the game, passing down your love for the game to another generation,” says Steve Mays, president of Founders Group International, which owns and manages 21 courses in and around Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. “The biggest thing is just to focus in on the fun of the game. It’s not so much about dress code, about that image. It’s just fun. It’s good exercise, it’s good to be outside, it’s a constructive hobby. We just need to keep that momentum going.”

NOW STREAMING

In addition to his public work, Richardson is the father of Haley Lu Richardson, a young actress with more than a dozen movies on her resume, including The Edge of Seventeen, in which she starred alongside Woody Harrelson, Kyra Sedgwick and Hailee Steinfeld, and Five Feet Apart, a love story that cast her at a pre-pandemic social distance from her fellow Disney Channel alum Cole Sprouse. Richardson is tuned in to Hollywood thanks to his daughter and the trends he sees there might work for golf.

“You see millions and millions of dollars being invested in Netflix or Amazon Prime miniseries,” he says, “and there’s a reason for that. People can watch them in increments. Some people have an hour, some people have six or seven hours. Golf is going to continue to realize we need to offer our commodity in different sizes to meet different types of players and what they’re looking for.

“Time is one of the most precious commodities golf course architects can give people. We’re not supposed to provide a golf course that beats you up and keeps you out there for five hours. As Bill Yates, the pace-of-play guru, said, the golf course architect determines how much time you spend on the golf course. We need courses that aren’t as long and don’t take as much time — and we’ve needed these things for 15 years or more, but now would be a good time to get them done.”

Richardson, Bel Jan and so many others across the industry expect more investment in bringing in and holding on to different demographics, in short courses and executive courses, in instruction areas and putting greens, in ranges where people can escape to during lunch.

After all, golf courses can be whatever we want them to be.