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For superintendents, deciding to pursue a general manager position can happen in a lot of different ways. Usually, it’s a goal at the end of a five- or ten-year plan that has long been brewing in their mind. But sometimes an unexpected opportunity arises and opens up a clear path. Whatever drives the upward move, it’s a step that an increasing number of veteran greenkeepers have taken in recent years and it’s likely to be a path of advancement for many more in the next decade.

Part of the appeal of moving to the general manager’s office is financial, but there is also the knowledge that it is probably going to be less physically taxing and emotionally draining than the daily grind of tending to a golf course. The early mornings, the dependence upon the weather, the weekends at work, the lost time with family during the proverbial 100 days of midseason hell, and the inevitable burden of staff recruitment, training and retention. They all take a toll that makes an exit from the superintendent world while in one’s late 40s or early 50s a very inviting proposition for some.

Not that there is anything easy or stress-free about serving as the GM (or CEO, or COO) of a golf club or country club. Having traded outdoors for indoors as a basic working environment, the responsibilities can increase dramatically. It's not unusual to have 15 to 20 regular monthly committee meetings scheduled, and you’ll still be at the course on the weekends because that’s when a lot of the action is happening. The budget you are responsible for is probably about three times what you had as a superintendent. That’s because your average annual maintenance allocation is anywhere from 25 percent to 40 percent of a club’s total budget. Now you're responsible for all of it, and have to work closely with food and beverage, membership, catering, and an outside regulatory and security environment. That entails constant interaction with community agencies and various interest groups.

If you thought it was tough trying to deal with golfers demanding “championship conditions,” try wrestling with successful business people who are now your volunteer board members, committee chairs and everyday constituents – many of them with strong wills and firm ideas about how to run the club’s business, even if they don’t really have much understanding of it at all.

A Portable Skill Set

Armen Suny has seen both sides of the business. A veteran superintendent in the Philadelphia and Denver areas, his resume includes prepping for the 1977 U.S. Amateur at Aronimink (Pa.) as an intern, the 1981 U.S. Open at Merion (Pa.) as an assistant, the 1985 PGA Championship at Cherry Hills (Colo.) as grounds superintendent, and a PGA Tour stop at Castle Pines (Colo.) from 1986-92, where he was both vice president of agronomy and tournament director. He eventually got recruited as general manager of Shadow Creek in North Las Vegas. This career move was less the product of a plan than the outcome of a steady progression, one that included the realization that he had the managerial skills necessary to oversee an entire facility and a great opportunity before him. He now serves as a consultant with the Phoenix-based executive search firm of Kopplin Kuebler & Wallace.

Rare is the general manager who, like Suny in the late 1990s at Shadow Creek, works for and reports to only one person – in his case, owner Steve Wynn. “I had it easy,” admits Suny. The more typical scenario is constantly having to anticipate the concerns of members, board members and key personnel – whether they are head chefs, golf professionals or the superintendent – through long-term financial planning. The spreadsheet skills a superintendent applies to labor, equipment maintenance and capital needs form the basis of the larger-scale, facility-wide planning that will make or break a general manager. As will the interpersonal skills of judging talent, acknowledging special effort, imposing discipline where appropriate, and exercising care and empathy in the case of special needs like a family health crisis.

You trade out pesticide application logs for facility inspection schedules. You put aside your understanding of aerification for an overview of clubhouse HVAC needs. The skill set that determines success as a superintendent is portable to the GM role. It just has to be applied on a much larger scale, with more moving parts, and with greater need for tact and diplomacy with a wider array of constituents.

"The skill set that determines success as a superintendent is portable to the GM role."

A Laboratory for Advancement

Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis (Mo.) has become something of a laboratory for the upward mobility of superintendents. Before arriving at Bellerive in 2012, John Cunningham, CGCS, had already managed multicourse facilities at Black Diamond Ranch (Fla.) and the Four Seasons Resort and Club at Las Colinas (Texas) – the latter stint including a total course overhaul and tournament directorship of the PGA Tour’s Byron Nelson Classic.

At Bellerive, Cunningham had the Senior PGA Championship looming in 2013 and a PGA Championship in 2018, with a golf course that needed considerable improvement to its greens and drainage to accommodate championship demands – all of which he undertook in his six years there. Along the way, he brought on board a promising younger associate with whom he had previously worked named Carlos Arraya. Halfway through his tenure as director of agronomy at Bellerive, Cunningham took on additional duties as assistant general manager, while delegating his day-to-day management of the golf course to Arraya, who served as superintendent.

The handoff worked for everyone, including the club, and exemplified Cunningham’s commitment to leadership. As he described it, leadership entails empowering others while having the confidence to delegate. For example, he said “a superintendent might not know how to grind a reel, but he hires a mechanic for that and entrusts the craftsman to do that job.” On a larger scale, said Cunningham, “a general manager leads by aligning the efforts of skilled professionals in various departments, encourages people to broaden their views, creates an overall strategy for integration of talent and then solves problems as they might arise. In which case, the job is to monitor, observe, communicate and lead.” Not all that different from being a superintendent, just with a different set of things to monitor and problems to solve.

After Bellerive, Cunningham moved on to become general manager at Aronimink, and from there to his current post as general manager and chief operating officer at Grandfather Golf and Country Club in the North Carolina mountains. Meanwhile, his mentee and successor at Bellerive, Arraya, served as director of agronomy, then assistant general manager and, since 2012, as general manager and CEO at Bellerive.

When asked about the keys to becoming a successful GM, Arraya emphasized two things. “Improve your listening,” he said, “and learn to become uncomfortably uncomfortable.” By this he means as GM you will be put in new situations and you must learn how to adjust to them by pushing yourself and others.

Don’t Do It All, Just Make Sure It Gets Done

Up at Fox Meadow Golf and Country Club in Prince Edward Island, Canada, Paul MacCormack wears two hats. He’s both general manager and superintendent at this daily-fee facility. His reason for taking on both jobs was a matter of finances, both personal and institutional. “It was the only way I saw as a means to make more money than being a super,” he said. “And at the time I took over, the course was struggling financially, and by combining both roles it saved quite a bit of money.”

In undertaking both roles, MacCormack quickly learned that it was not necessary or possible for him to personally do everything. He had to manage things and people to make sure the necessary work was undertaken. “I don’t have to know how to do every job,” he said, “I just have to know how to make sure all the jobs get done.”

“I don’t have to know how to do every job,” he said, “I just have to know how to make sure all the jobs get done.”

Tom Feller, the general manager at Cedar Rapids Country Club (Iowa), puts it more prosaically: “I don't need to touch every table at dinner any more than I need to know how to make tapioca pudding. But I do need to make sure that the people whose job it is are, in fact, doing it well.”

Feller was not planning on leaving his post of 18 years as the superintendent at Cedar Rapids when he agreed to sit in on interviews for the new general manager. But after serving under nine GMs in his 30-plus-years in the business throughout the Midwest, he came away unimpressed with the three short-listed finalists. “I’m not sure they bring what we need, I’m not sure they understand our club’s culture,” he told his board president. When asked to explain, Feller elaborated a length. The club president responded by saying, “Well, you know the club well, would you be interested in serving as GM? Think about it.”

He did, and the more Feller thought about it the more he thought he could make a constructive difference in the club’s operations. He came back to the board saying he’d take on the role, but only if he could do so on his terms, by reorganizing leadership and delegating authority for each of the three pillars of the club – golf operations, clubhouse and finance. The team concept, with Feller overseeing, got established just in time for the club to endure two major crises in 2020: first the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, then a devastating region-wide windstorm that ravaged the course, taking out more than 700 specimen hardwoods and completely altering the landscape of the Donald Ross layout. Faced with challenges on that scale, knowing how to get things done couldn’t have been more important and Feller’s training as a superintendent served him and the club well as they navigated those unprecedented circumstances.

The Road Ahead

Neither the 20,000-member Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) nor the 7,800-member Club Management Association of America (CMAA) tracks data on shared affiliations between the two groups. Perhaps they should. Judging from conversations with various industry sources, the number is at least “several hundred.” There is every reason to believe that the movement of superintendents into leading management ranks will continue and accelerate.
 

"There is every reason to believe that the movement of superintendents into leading management ranks will continue and accelerate."

One thing is clear from hiring trends, the gap in skill set between the two worlds is shrinking. Having a general manager who is well-versed in every aspect of caring for a golf facility’s primary asset – the course – is a great place to start. Today’s superintendents also wear more hats than ever before, manage larger budgets, more complex rules and regulations, and are all too familiar with the challenges of hiring and retaining skilled staff. Any superintendent who has functioned as project manager for a large-scale renovation in recent years would be particularly well positioned to run an operation because the coordination needed between the golf side, the food and beverage operation, public utilities, regulatory bodies and various technical experts serves as a trial run for what day-to-day club management is like.

The job of a golf course superintendent has been much more than growing grass for a long time now. Broader recognition of that fact is opening new doors for superintendents and teaching some of them more about tapioca pudding than they ever expected to learn.

Bradley S. Klein is a veteran golf course writer, book author and design consultant. He has previously written for the USGA Green Section Record on golf course renovation planning and other topics.