Establishing new roots

Renee Geyer was 7 years old and still in second grade the first time she performed alongside her sister at a wedding somewhere in southeast Ohio.

Geyer had prepared for this moment for years. Her parents had put a violin in her little hands when she was 3, had set her in front of a piano a couple years after that. She would later sing in two different choirs, study chorale music in college, a life in music and a career in music education almost certain. Her sister, Renata, three years older, was on a similar track. They shared a passion, a drive. They shared talent.

You better practice, she remembers. Practice, practice, practice, and just do it as perfectly as possible. Do it the way it’s supposed to be.

“We had this pressure,” she says. “And it wasn’t bad pressure, but we had this pressure of, this is somebody’s wedding, and you better practice and you better make sure it’s the best it can be.

“That’s what I lived with my entire childhood.”

Renee Geyer, CGCS, is 40 years old and nearing the end of her third full season as the golf course superintendent at Canterwood Golf & Country Club in Gig Harbor, Washington. Her career arc is markedly different than what her parents, Rick and Rita, figured it might be decades ago. She has not performed at a wedding in years. She still sings, just not professionally.

A Justin Timberlake cardboard cutout stands in the corner of her office. It wears her collection of industry show and event credentials.

“We’ve got a few things that have to happen as far as extras on the range today,” Geyer says. She is standing in front of the maintenance team, rattling off first jobs for an early morning ahead of the club’s Member-Guest Invitational — pressure of a different, but no less intense, variety. It is 4:30 a.m. She arrived more than an hour ago. She will be here for at least another 17. “After first shift, I’m pretty much gonna be able to handle those things. I may ask one or two of you if I think I’m gonna need a hand to help me with that.” Her delivery is almost musical.

“So today, everything is pulled out, OK? Except for drag carts. Everything else should be pulled out. Jerry’s in the shop. Jeff and Zach, irrigation. We’ll chat briefly. Kevin, can you please change cups? There is no pin sheet. No pin sheet today. Can you please also mark ground under repairs? As far as the ditches go, 18 and 2. I put a couple cans of paint in your cart. Todd, full tee service. All the blocks come off and stay off to the side. Everything comes off, but blues and whites will go back on after we’re done mowing. All the other horseshoes get set off to the side.”

Geyer is in a groove. “Vinny, please mow rough. Continue from where you were yesterday. James, No. 10. Nora, No. 11. Gus, No. 12. Luis, No. 13, hand mow. 12, 6, no cleanup. You have rakes in the back of your carts. Please hand rake your greenside bunkers. Joe, can you please roll? You’re going to start on 10 and follow those guys. Nacho, can you please hand rake fairway bunkers? You’re going to start on 11. Dylan, can you please triplex blue and white tees?”

Geyer delivers all this in three minutes and sends the team out into the morning dark. It feels like she has been on the Canterwood property for three decades rather than three years.

All those childhood performances helped prepare her for this. So did her 13 years at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, where she started as an intern before nearly a decade as an assistant superintendent and a capstone run as Fazio Course superintendent.

Chorale music to turf.

Ohio to Washington.

Big changes.

Geyer stepped out of whatever comfort zone she had carved for herself — literally, lyrically, metaphorically, geographically — and bet big on herself for both. So much of what she knew would not apply.

“Coming out here just changed the whole understanding about what good agronomic programming is,” she says. “It was a pretty big pill to swallow, because practices that I was used to, or that I would have encouraged, they just don’t work here — because the type of grass, the collar, you’re wet for eight months out of the year, you’re dry for four months out of the year. You have to pick your battles.”

Beyond agronomics, Geyer had no idea how she would be received by a team filled with full-timers who have tended to the course since before the turn of the last century. Some of them have worked at Canterwood since the borders were staked back in 1988 — maybe even since before the architect Robert Muir Graves designed it with the aim of making it the most difficult course in western Washington.

“They’ve been here for 23 years, 33 years,” she says. “We got a new one. How’s this gonna go? Because I’m the fourth superintendent in the course’s history, and, A, I’m not from the area; B, I’m a woman; C, I happen to be gay; and D, I am younger probably than 75 percent of my full-timers. There’s four things that when I walked into the room the first time, I can only imagine the questions running through their head.”

None of it mattered.

“Actions speak louder than words,” says assistant superintendent Zachary Crawford, who arrived at Canterwood in April 2020 from Tacoma Country & Golf Club. “When I showed up, everyone was older than me. I wasn’t going to just drive around and doing nothing. I will work with them on everything. She was like that, too.”

Geyer won over the Canterwood team with the same work ethic and personal touch she carried with her from childhood. She had been in Washington for less than a week, aerification was in full swing, and a team member was pulled away by a phone call.

“We were right in the middle of topdressing and dragging, the whole nine yards,” she says. “And he has a family emergency with one of his kids. I said, ‘Go home.’ He looked at me. ‘What?’ ‘Go. Go take care of what you need to take care of. Go be with your family.’ I give them that respect, and they give it back to me. They know that I’m not going to ask them to do something that I won’t do myself, and it works. Family comes first, and just be kind to one another.”

Geyer has not been alone on or off the course throughout her turf career. Professionally, she relies on Crawford, irrigation technician Jeff Ellison, foreman and equipment operator Joe Brown, spray tech Dylan Knezvich and so many other talented turf pros. Away from work, she met her wife, Emily, when they were both still teenaged members of the All-Ohio State Fair Youth Choir under the direction of Charles Snyder. They dated throughout their 20s and wound up tying the knot at Firestone. Geyer’s other major director, Lisa Springer of the Lancaster-Fairfield Youth Choir and Lancaster City Schools, officiated the ceremony.

“I tell her often, ‘I can’t do this job without you,’” Geyer says. “She sometimes balks at that, and I’m like, ‘No, seriously.’ She’s so patient. She knows that my time commitment has to be large in order to make this work and she’s awesome. She really gets it, the fact that when I have to be here, I have to be here, and I can’t ask for anything more than that. She’s wonderful.”

Emily has been a part of almost every step of Geyer’s turf journey, starting at Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster, where Geyer studied under former turfgrass management program coordinator Dave Willoughby and associate professor Dr. Daniel Voltz.

She was there, too, when Geyer started working at Wooster Country Club, where superintendent Scott McLain trusted Geyer enough to mow the step cut after class, then wash up and lock up for the night.

And she was there when Geyer landed her internship at Firestone in 2009. Larry Napora, the longtime director of golf course operations had arrived at Firestone the previous year after decade-plus runs at Treesdale Golf & Country Club in Pennsylvania and as a regional director of agronomy for ClubCorp. He remembers a 20something who was always smiling.

“You gotta smile,” Napora says. “I don’t care how bad your day is, you have to smile, because you come in here at 5:30, 6 o’clock in the morning, if you’re in a bad mood then, they’re in a bad mood. She just brightens up the room when she walks in.”

When Napora and Geyer started at Firestone, a 54-hole operation, the maintenance department employed no assistant superintendents. Napora shifted the structure and, after one season, hired Geyer in the new role. She did everything over the next eight years, diving into whatever muck was needed. A promotion to Fazio Course superintendent followed.

“She never missed a beat,” Napora says. “She went in there, didn’t really change a whole lot, but tweaked it to her style. I worried about nothing. Her staff respected her and would do anything for her, because she got in the trenches with them. She was here early, she was here late, she was here both days on the weekends. When your staff sees you doing it, they respect you a whole lot.”

Geyer helped lead a bunker renovation on the course in 2021. At the same time, she was itching to move. She had interviewed for other positions within Invited — Firestone and Canterwood are among the company formerly known as ClubCorp’s more than 150 facilities — but hadn’t found the right fit. When Canterwood opened, everything clicked. She finished the renovation and her last agricultural plan, then headed west.

“The construction helped sort of finalize that feeling of OK, I’ve gone through this experience now and maybe I am ready,” Geyer says. “I remember having a conversation with Larry: ‘Hey, I’m really considering this.’ And he just looked me and he said, ‘You’re ready.’ And getting a blessing like that from somebody like that, that made me feel better about it.”

She started at Canterwood on her 37th birthday.

Moving west was Geyer’s second big gamble. Her first was shifting her professional focus from music to turf.

“My dad never said, ‘You have to go into music.’ But it wasn’t not said,” she says. “It was the expectation that was put forth from a young age, everybody just assumed. And I finally realized that I don’t have to do something just because someone else thought it was a good idea. I had to live my life for me, and not through the lens of what someone else’s ideas or hopes were. Do I still love music? I do. But did I love it enough to continue down a path I wasn’t sure I’d be happy with?

“I just had to step away and say no. I just didn’t want to have any regrets.”

She had mowed lawns throughout her childhood. She also learned the game of golf from her godfather, Lew Wasem. “Getting to the point where I was independent enough to make this choice for myself, this was the perfect marriage of me loving to be outside and the fine details of lawn care.”

Her father, who passed away in 2013, never pushed her, just encouraged, directed. “I’ll never be sorry about all of those experiences because they formulated who I am as a person in a lot of ways.” Every time she speaks to the team. Every time she prepares the course for another day of golfers.

This is what she lives with her entire life.

Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry's managing editor.