Like many golf courses around the world, Laurelwood Golf Course in Eugene, Oregon, blocked off its tee sheet in early March 2020, shuttered during the earliest and most uncertain days of the COVID-19 pandemic. And, like many golf courses around the world, it reopened a month or so later with that aforementioned tee sheet overflowing with names and tee times.
The golf boom was in full swing at a perfect 9-holer in TrackTown USA.
The only problem with all those golfers walking from hole to hole was that Will Benson couldn’t keep up with them. Benson operates Laurelwood for the City of Eugene as a private contractor and has worked as the superintendent in some shape for more than 17 years. When the pandemic hit, he was tending to the course with just two other people. He needed more help. So, he called an old friend, Heather Holte, a star decades ago on the University of Oregon softball and golf teams, a former Laurelwood pro shop employee and, at the time, the softball coach at nearby Thurston High School.
“I don’t even know why I called her, exactly,” Benson says. “But I asked her, ‘You got any employees?’ ‘I got one! I’ll send her over.’”
That her turned out to be a high school softball player without any softball to play named Olivia Jegtvig. She worked hard and impressed Benson and, before long, he asked her, “You know anyone else?”
“‘My friend Savana got laid off from Old Navy,’” Benson remembers Jegtvig telling him.
“‘Let’s call Savana!’”
Savana was Savana Decker, a high school softball standout who weighed “about 82 pounds.” Benson figured she would last five days at Laurelwood. She’s going on five years. “And now she can run an excavator, she can change heads, she can wire most anything out there, she can run all the sharpening equipment, she can do all that,” Benson says. “She’s grown to that from folding shirts at Old Navy.”
That first year, Olivia and Savana were followed by Leila and Harmony, and Luke and Deacon, and Eddie and Jenz — many of them Thurston High School Colts. The next year, seven more teenagers found their way onto the maintenance crew — five of them women. In 2022, another six showed up, including three women — Decker’s little sister Sadie among them. In 2023, two of the seven new hires were women. And last year, three of the eight newbies were women. In all, 18 of the 38 Laurelwood maintenance team members over the last five years have been women. Eight of them were still on the team last season.
In an industry open more to women with every passing day, Laurelwood provides a template for how to find the right people, how to teach them about the work and how to bring them back season after season.
Benson has worked enough jobs over the years — and enough years on a golf course — to know how to teach.
Before the start of the pandemic, when attracting and hiring new team members provided more of a challenge, he would bring in just about anybody who applied. The folks who tended to last more than a week or two were those who grew up outdoors, chopping wood, operating tractors, maybe raising donkeys or showing lambs at the fair. But those folks were few. He gets more of them now, and he tends to avoid easing them in, preferring instead to throw them on equipment the first week and watching how they respond.
Case in point: “My second day,” Decker says, “I was on a fairway mower.”
“Me too!” says Lexi Tuntland, another former Thurston softball player who has earned her welding certificate and has almost wrapped up her diesel mechanic certificate during her four years at Laurelwood. “I remember my second day when Will put me on a fairway mower.”
“I was on a roller,” adds Olivia Grandberry, who played softball at Thurston, picked up golf when she started working at Laurelwood three years ago and is now a 6-handicapper who plays golf at Southwestern Oregon Community College. “I was like, ‘What am I doing out here?!’”
“You’re lucky,” Benson tells them. “People take three years to get to this position!”
Benson also tends to avoid verbal lashings, opting instead to let his young team learn gently on the job. What better way to learn how to mow fairways and roll greens, how to sharpen reels — how to dive into irrigation and excavation work every season — than to actually hop on the machine and figure out how it works?
“He was so nice with our mistakes,” Decker says. “I would scalp the crap out of the rough, and he would be like, ‘It grows back.’”
“He was understanding,” Tuntland says. “He let us learn.”
“That’s probably what got me to stay, was just how kind he was,” Decker says.
“He let us learn,” Tuntland says. “He let us mess up and it was OK.”
After hearing for years about the Laurelwood experience from older teammates, Grandberry called Benson shortly after turning 16 and begged him to let her work. That first experience on a roller came during her third day on the job.
“I was comfortable rolling, but I had one of those days, I was kind of tired, didn’t put the pin in the hitch and I drove down the hill and the roller drove in the middle of the driving range,” she says. “I just sat down and started crying. I called Will. ‘The roller’s in the middle of the driving range. I’m really sorry.’ That was probably my worst day.”
He put her back on it the next day.
Tuntland shares a similar story.
“I got here in June of ’21, right after I graduated high school,” she says. “That fall, I was driving one of our service carts and I had our Buffalo blower behind us and I was coming down right through the trees between 1 and 9 and it started to get really wet. I remember, because Will told me he watched me from up top — ‘Be careful over there!’ — so naturally I went over there. I remember seeing the Buffalo blower come around this way and it whipped me, and I just jumped out of my cart. I didn’t want to roll. ‘You OK?’ ‘I’m OK.’”
“The best way to learn is to make mistakes,” Grandberry says. “If you don’t make mistakes out here, you’re not going to learn what not to do.”
The Laurelwood culture has developed over the last five seasons thanks in part to a string of Thurston Colts, some staying on for two or three years before heading off to college, and thanks in part to everything Benson has let them do.
In addition to just hopping on equipment and figuring it out, he has knocked out a series of relatively major projects, one just about every year. The fourth green. The fifth green. Bunkers all around the third green. “We’ve redone almost all the greens,” Benson says. “All new irrigation on the greens. We’ve redone a lot of the tee boxes. We built this whole outdoor area.
“Once they were really pushing me,” he continues. “‘You don’t trust us to sharpen the machinery.’ ‘It’s not that I don’t trust you. You’ve never done it.’ ‘Well, we want to learn.’ ‘All right.’” And they learned.
Benson learned, too.
“When Olivia came, and then Savana came, and then Leila came, I kind of got bonded to them. I was friends with these young kids,” he says. “They go to college and send me Snapchats. And I really liked them.” Benson would listen to the opinions of current team members when interviewing new potential employees. Tatum the steeplechaser, James the physicist, Max the soon-to-be-surely-famous composer — they all fit, and on a tight budget, to boot: Outside of Benson’s salary, the annual maintenance budget is about $250,000 to $350,000.
“We take care of all of our carts,” Benson says. “We take care of the driving range ourselves.” The year they rebuilt the third green, Benson says he received a bid for $43,000. He opted to keep the project in-house, rebuilt the third and seventh greens, and added a set of tees, all for less than $30,000. When the team redid the fifth in 2023, the total just topped $7,000.
“We trade out,” Benson says. “The guy who owns the excavator likes to eat here. If we write down the hours, the day’s rental fee just goes toward his tab.” Decker shaped that project. “She dug the trenches in the middle of winter and we did the grass bunkers and the drainage.”
Off the course, the team eats lunch together almost every day. Two summers ago, they all went to watch Barbie together. They have attended each other’s weddings — one in 2023 and two more last year. Benson attended them all, normally skipping out just early enough that he doesn’t wind up on the dance floor.
Some of them plan to remain in the industry in some way. Decker has talked with at least one major company about golf course construction — “I really like when we do projects,” she says —and recently started a new position managing a park for Lane County.
Tuntland is on the brink of her second professional certificate and is workig in the welding department for the Springfield School District. She wants to remain working around some combination of welding, diesel and golf courses. Benson has suggested she consider working for a major manufacturer, “because I understand the out-here part of it,” she says, gesturing to the golf course, “and the equipment part of it.”
Grandberry has no doubts about her future: Whenever her competitive golf career ends, she wants to study turfgrass and become a superintendent. Her goal? Succeed either Ken Nice as director of agronomy at Bandon Dunes — her current collegiate home course — or Benson at Laurelwood. “I really can’t see myself doing anything else,” she says. She plans to earn her pesticide license this summer during another season at Laurelwood and start Oregon State University’s Turfgrass Management Certification Program.
Whatever happens, Benson hopes more students keep filling the maintenance team. And why not? Plenty of golfers say the course has never looked better. Fewer ask if the maintenance team is all women. And fewer still — but enough to count, unfortunately — ask Decker, Tuntland, Grandberry or one of the other young women out on the course if they’re the cart girl.
“I don’t know what that is,” they reply.
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