DJ McClellan’s lunch hour may come at breakfast time.
“It’s like 8 o’clock in the morning, 9 o’clock in the morning, and they say, ‘Oh, I’m on my way to work,'” he says. “I could almost go eat now.
“I’ve already put in an eight-hour day by the time you’re ready to go to work.”
Hours probably still remain in his shift.
That’s okay, though, McClellan thinks. His job as a golf course superintendent is a lifelong job.
“I’ll probably do this until the day I die,” he said.
Jordan Booth smiled at that. He is the senior director of the USGA’s course consulting service, and McClellan was a student in a program he helps lead, the The USGA Greenskeeper Apprentice Program. Now in its fourth year and led by Brett Rusek, the program brings on board apprentice greenskeepers who continue to work on courses in the Pinehurst, NC, and Myrtle Beach, SC areas – Pinehurst Resort among them – and study at Sandhills Community College in Pinehurst or Horry-Georgetown Technical College in Conway, SC Apprentices are not yet charged for the program, and they work full-time at the courses.
The program touches on all parts of greenskeeping.
“We’ve identified this as a real challenge, workforce development in the game of golf, particularly in golf course maintenance,” Booth said. “So we started the Greenkeeper apprenticeship program here at Sandhills Community College.
“We feel really focused on people who have maybe worked in the game of golf for five more years, but they don’t have that education to understand why we do what we do, right? They can know how. What we feel the apprenticeship program provides is the why.”
McClellan took it all in, although before the program, he admitted that he was looking like most of the younger professionals.
“I really didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up,” he said with a laugh. Working at the golf shop in Pinehurst, he saw Booth.
“And he says, ‘Hey, I’m interested,'” Booth said. “You know how personable he is, right? So DJ is very interested in working on the golf course, but he didn’t know how to do it. So he finished the apprenticeship program and went from not working in golf at all or at least in golf course maintenance to being an apprentice to now being what we call a graduate.”
And now he’s a superintendent at Pinewild Country Club in Pinehurst. He is the first graduate of the GAP program to be hired as a super. He said it changed his life.
Booth thinks he’ll do the job for a while, too.
“It’s a great honor to be able to represent the GAP program and show someone who’s just starting out in golf, hey, this is a place I can go,” McClellan said. “I just kept my head down and worked hard and all the different things I did, they all worked out jobs. And now this is finally a career. I finally feel at home.
