One and only

Thirty-eight years later, Lee McLemore remembers the advice, even if he doesn’t remember who shared it.

McLemore was concluding his final months at Auburn University, checking out the bulletin board packed with turf jobs and conferring with his girlfriend, Amy, about where he should apply.

“Our plan was, Where were we being led to go?” McLemore says. “I really wanted to stay in the Southeast.” And someone — A professor, perhaps? A classmate? A visiting superintendent? — told him: “If you land in a major metropolitan area, at a big club, you’ll be able to make that next move a whole lot easier.”

Sound advice, yes, but sound advice that McLemore has never actually used.

McLemore received offers to start his career in March 1987 as an assistant superintendent at Belle Meade Country Club in Nashville, working under Doug Ward, and at The Country Club of Birmingham, working under Brian Bowles. At the time, Nashville was home to about twice as many people as Birmingham, which checked that major-metro recommendation. But Birmingham was only about 90 miles from McLemore’s hometown of Moulton, Alabama, and he had worked there as an intern each of the two previous summers, one of them filled with 80-plus-hour construction weeks.

“I really felt like I was being led to Birmingham,” he says.

He stayed in Alabama.

And he has never left.

McLemore’s situation is not unique in the golf course maintenance industry, but it is rare. Working at one club or course — and only one club or course — for a career is almost impossible. Almost every turf pro moves at least once or twice during their career. McLemore has not. Yes, he worked a couple high school summers at his hometown course — Deer Run Golf Course in Moulton, then a new 9-holer — but he has worked his entire professional career at The Country Club of Birmingham. Including his two intern summers, he has tended to the 36 holes and many more people there for the last 40 years.

At The Country Club of Birmingham, longevity is “part of the culture,” McLemore says. West Course superintendent Tim Kocks arrived almost alongside McLemore and has worked at the club for 40 years. East Course superintendent Bobby Knight is celebrating 30 years. Landscape superintendent Jeff Rainwater is over 20 years, as are seven full-time maintenance team members. Director of golf Eric Eshleman, who is also the current PGA of America secretary, is only the fifth pro in the club’s 127-year history. McLemore — who was promoted to superintendent after just six weeks as assistant back in 1987 after Bowles left for another position and is now the director of golf course operations — is only the sixth or seventh person to lead maintenance efforts.

“I’m pretty loyal, and they are too,” McLemore says. “And the club has also been loyal.”

Longevity and loyalty are prevalent for every superintendent who has worked their entire career in one place. Take Jason Stewart at Brickyard Crossing at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, Indiana. Or Will Stearns at Southers Marsh Golf Club in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Or Bob Hingston at John P. Larkin Country Club in Windsor, Vermont. Or Craig Sondergaard at Racine Country Club in Racine, Wisconsin. Sondergaard is entering his seventh season as superintendent at his hometown club and his 13th season overall and, like McLemore, has only a handful of predecessors over the club’s 116-year history. “That’s a pretty cool thing to be a part of,” he says.

Sondergaard first worked at Racine Country Club as a teenager, caddying three or four years before leaving for his only job off the grounds: working behind the counter at a Papa Murphy’s take-and-bake pizza shop.

Sondergaard returned to the club seeking more money — and while he did manage a 75-cent raise to $9 an hour, he was working four fewer months per year on superintendent Mike Handrich’s team than he was prepping pizzas, first as an intern, then as a crew member. Sondergaard did make up the difference by sticking around during his second winter: “Embarrassing as it is,” he says, “I was a server in the clubhouse.” And, by his own account, he was not a very good one.

“On the golf course, we want the water out of the containers and on the turf,” he says. “So, I thought, in the clubhouse, why do I want this water to stay in a cup?! Let me spill it all over the floor.” He pauses for a few seconds, then confirms, “That’s a joke, obviously.”

He returned to the crew the next year and, late during the season, around the time he earned his turf degree from Penn State World Campus, he received a sudden promotion to assistant superintendent. Four years after that, Handrich announced his retirement and recommended the board interview Sondergaard for the position. The club hired him. He has no plans to leave.

Stewart arrived at Brickyard Crossing fresh out of Purdue University in May 1999. He and his wife, Denise, even lived in the neighborhood, starting out in a small home in the shadow of the Speedway. They treated it like a playground. He almost always walked to the course. Like Sondergaard, Stewart received promotions without ever moving to another course, first to assistant superintendent in 2002, then superintendent in 2017, and grounds superintendent in 2020. He and Denise, a longtime teacher, agreed they would eschew the career climb in favor of stability as they started a family. He likes to joke that he just outlasted everybody else.

“A lot of that was because I was engaged,” with the property, he says. “We went through some lean times at the Speedway and I never turned negative. I like the problem-solving. That’s appealing to me. I don’t want to struggle — I’m not out of my mind — but it’s nice to have to fight for something, chasing things down, creating roadmaps, being patient and persistent. That’s appealing to me, too.”

A pair of New England one-club superintendents have very different situations from McLemore, Sondergaard or Stewart. Where those three had always focused on turf, neither Stearns nor Hingston did early in their careers.

Stearns is the superintendent and co-owner of Southers Marsh, which he helped build with his father, “Big” Will Stearns. Stearns studied mechanical engineering at Harvard with the goal of designing specialty equipment for cranberry farming and, after three years in New York on the Mercantile Exchange, returned to Plymouth to work in his family’s cranberry bogs. Golf just sort of developed over time, first four holes, then 18, all braided through 30 acres of bogs. Not only has Stearns worked at one course, he’s the lone superintendent in the history of Southers Marsh.

“I’m in a pretty unique situation,” Stearns says with a laugh. “My first job in golf was head superintendent. Well, I guess my first job, really, was course construction, mostly putting in irrigation systems. After that, it was turf school and straight into being head superintendent, which is not a normal path, by any means.”

Hingston didn’t take a “normal path,” either. After long stretches at a hardware store and in sporting goods, he worked 16 years as athletic director at Windsor High School — where, yes, he was often tasked with maintaining various fields and courts. After retiring in 2015, he wound up joining superintendent Steve Ashworth’s team at JPL.

“I worked some inside initially and (Steve) kept coming in in the morning and saying, ‘Bob, you worked on fields at the school. A couple of my guys are going off to school. Would you help me a couple days a week?’ And I liked it. It’s immediate satisfaction. You mow fairways and you’re driving home, you’re going up that windy road by the course and you’re looking down, you go, ‘Darn, that looks good, and you did that.’ I didn’t always have that with my other jobs.”

Ashworth retired from the golf course in 2017 and returned to his family farm in New Hampshire — he died suddenly in 2021 — and Hingston took over. He has handled superintendent duties over multiple seasons since then and is now, at 73, the day-to-day bookkeeper and a member of the maintenance team, part of the glue of a great local 9-holer.

“You feel proud to be part of it,” he says. “I always want to be part of a winning team and we’re a winning team right now.”

Job turnover started to increase during the Great Resignation of 2021 and ’22: According to Pew Research Center data, 2.5 percent of the U.S. workforce changed jobs each month during the first quarter of 2022. That same survey indicated that more than one of every five U.S. workers was exploring the prospect of a new job.

And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average U.S. employee has worked for their current employer for 4.6 years. No surprise, workers 65 or older are at an average of 10.3 years. Among the turf pros interviewed for this story, only Hingston fits that demographic and, almost spot on, this will be his 11th season at JPL. Younger workers from 25 to 34 have a median tenure of about 3.2 years. Though he has worked in four different positions during his 12 years at Racine Country Club, Sondergaard, 31 this month, easily tops that.

Younger workers are not the most likely to change jobs, though. According to the BLS, folks will change jobs an average of 2.4 times from 25 to 34. During the next decade of work and life, from 35 to 44, that average jumps to 2.9. And from 45 to 52? The average dips back down to 1.9.

In an industry — and a nation — where moving around is encouraged, what can you learn from folks who never have?

Don’t overreact. “There are a lot of things day to day that get us frustrated as superintendents,” Sondergaard says. “Looking back on them, as frustrating as they were in the moment, it’s like, ‘OK, I’m glad I made it through that.’ If I would have left because of a stressful situation or something that got under my skin, I would have started all over and learned a new club, a new staff, a new golf course. And chances are a similar situation would have happened.”

You don’t always need to move up. Stewart has received three promotions during his decades at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but he has had more opportunities than that to advance. “I don’t think you can be a parent,” he says. “I realized I would have to stop coaching, stop being there for my family, and there’s just not enough time in the day. There’s not enough energy. Cognitively, there’s no way.”

Grow and create value. “The person I report to, if I can make their job easier and they can go home earlier, I’ve created a lot of value,” Stewart says. “They’ll fight for me.” Professional growth helps, too. “Communication skills, listening skills, your ability to adapt to build relationships, your attitude, your effort — all those things that you can just keep growing and getting better help you put yourself in a position to take the next step.”

They have doubts, too. “There were times I was like, ‘What am I doing?’” Stearns says. “It was such a grind. We went 10 years without making any money. This is a lot of work to do for free. But there weren’t a lot of exit strategies, given that the whole family lives on the property and my father would never hear of it.” The Stearnses briefly entertained the idea of converting the course and bogs into a solar farm. “But if you do that, it loses a lot of that magic.”

Stay humble. “In this kind of business, you never get too proud,” McLemore says. “You never stick your chest out too far because it can be very humbling. Mother Nature will just throw a curveball in a heartbeat. When there have been challenges, I tell some of our young guys who have gone on to superintendent jobs, never get too big for your britches, because you’ll be humbled, so you might as well be humble to begin with.”

What keeps a turf pro in one spot for so long? Read enough studies and common responses pop up again and again: Burnout. More flexibility. More recognition. A new challenge. Career advancement — and, on the flip side, less stress. And, of course, more money. But everyone interviewed for this story mentioned one thing that has kept them at their course or club for so long.

“It’s the people,” Hingston says. “It’s the relationships.”

Hingston mentions some of his JPL friends by nickname — because everyone has a nickname at JPL — and their extra effort: Smitty will jump in his truck at 4:30 in the morning to pick up sod in Maine. Grizzy contributes to every mechanical need. Jocko, at 83, still climbs high to lead tree projects.

“I’m a people person. Relationships are a huge part of my life,” Hingston says. “It’s all the people who keep me a part of it.”

Sondergaard is quick to credit the staff and their experience, “starting with my foreman, Ruben Almaraz, at almost 30 years. And then his brother, Sammy Almaraz, he’s been here almost 25 years. There’s a culture here that, obviously these guys are going to retire at some point, but that would be awful tough to leave voluntarily.”

Stearns just wants people to come to the course “with the mindset of, ‘I’m going to have fun today and not be tortured.’”

Stewart values his team so much that, shortly before he was promoted to Brickyard Crossing superintendent, he tendered his resignation because management appeared firm in not providing him with enough people and resources for an LPGA event. “I went in and told the guys I was sorry,” he says, “that I fought for them.” Management responded quickly with more people and more equipment.

After nearly 40 years in Birmingham and a lifetime in Alabama, McLemore uses the word family. “They treat you like family and that’s a big part of the longevity. And there’s still a sense of appreciation, giving me that chance, even though it was long ago. It’s still there.”

Sometimes, down deep, he says, he still thinks he does owe the club something for taking a chance on him so many years ago, for sticking with him, season after season. And for supporting him and his family during the most difficult of times.

“Our oldest daughter, Franny, passed away suddenly in 2012. She was a junior at Auburn. She was kind of our golden child, had just got accepted to pharmacy school as a fourth-generation pharmacist, carrying on the family tradition. It was from a pulmonary embolism. The club just wrapped their arms around us. We’re just forever grateful.”

The Alabama GCSA has since named its legacy scholarship in Franny’s honor. And the club, McLemore says, has been a big contributor.

“This past year, I was on the board that started a foundation for that,” he says. “One of our former club presidents and golf chairman — and a good friend — he is on that board and helped us get started as a 501(c)(3) so we can start growing that even more for the association. The scholarship is just part of it.

“It has been a special relationship that I am so blessed with.”