Scott Rohlfsen arrived at Willow Run Country Club in Denver, Iowa, two minutes ago and is already heading toward a golf cart to go out on the course and cut cups when his cell phone rings.
His cell phone rings a lot.
“Hey, man, what’s up?” he asks. “Uh-oh,” he says. “Where you at? What hole are you on?” His face scrunches. “OK, get it off the green. I’m in the shop, I’ll be right over.”
Rohlfsen hops in the same cart he was going to drive to the first hole and heads in the opposite direction. “The greens mower says he thinks the mower is leaking oil,” he says. “All I can do is hope it’s not.” Without stopping, Rohlfsen explains the situation. “He’s a high-school kid. Usually starts at 5:30, but he had weightlifting today. He probably started at 7:30. Good thing I’m here.” He laughs an enormous laugh, because what else do you do when oil is probably leaking on a green at 8:32 in the morning?
In less than a minute, Rohlfsen pulls up next to the green. Morning dew still covers the turf. The oil leak will be more visible later this morning and afternoon, eight parallel passes of a light gold-brown. It’s still difficult to see them now, but Jordan, the teenage mower, spotted them. So does Rohlfsen.
“Oh, good call, man,” he says, hopping out of the cart and walking over to the first streak. “Way to notice that. How did you notice that? You can see that tiny, little trail. Thanks for noticing that. The old guys never notice that, they just keep mowing.” Again, without stopping, Rohlfsen jumps ahead to the next step. “Why don’t you drive that back up to the shop?”
Back in the maintenance facility, Rohlfsen troubleshoots his way through the problem, first thinking about borrowing a hose from another mower before grabbing a wrench and working on prying the leaking hose off himself. “It doesn’t want to budge,” he says. Thinking. Got it. He hops in his Nissan Sentra — more on that later — and drives three quarters of a mile west down Main Street to Davis Farm & Auto. Trusted friends. Great mechanics.
“Imagine if I had been in Jesup right now and I get that call,” Rohelfsen says behind the wheel. “Be like, ‘OK, I’ll be there in an hour.’”
Thirteen minutes after Jordan called him, Rohlfsen drops off the hose with Byron Davis, exchanging hellos and catching up on the last round of mechanical challenges. “This is where a lot of our problems get solved,” he says. Thirteen minutes after that, Davis hands him the hose, good to go.
The details of this morning are not normal for Rohlfsen, but the pace is. Rohlfsen is the superintendent at five different 9-hole Iowa golf courses — Maple Hills Country Club in Tripoli, where he started his workday before 5:30, Willow Run in Denver, Jesup Golf & Country Club in Jesup, Vinton Country Club in Vinton, and Dysart Golf Club in Dysart. All five are just east of Cedar Falls — where Rohlfsen lives with his wife, Sarah, and helps her run a coffee shop, Sarah’s Espresso Cafe — and four of the five are within 60 miles of one another along Interstate 380.
All five courses opened during the 1960s, when Iowa provided funding for cities to turn farmland into golf courses and all are owned by members and run by boards. None of the five shares any equipment or crew.
None is joined to another by any bond other than their home state and their superintendent.
No state is home to more 9-hole golf courses than Iowa, which boasts 246, according to the National Golf Foundation — one for every 12,969 residents. How did one man wind up tending to five of them?
“I grew up around the golf course,” Rohlfsen says about his literally Rockwellian childhood at Linn Grove Country Club in Rockwell, about 100 miles north of Des Moines. “I was out there every day. My uncle’s friend was the superintendent and my uncle was his assistant. They did everything.” Rohlfsen played “all day long” and, like so many turf pros, eventually gravitated more toward maintenance. His first responsibility was emptying trash, then cutting cups.
After high school, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do other than I wanted to do something with plants,” he says. “My mom, Renee, wanted me to go into TV broadcasting. I was like, no. My dad somehow found out about turf management — I didn’t even know that was a thing — so I decided to go that direction. He somewhat jokingly said, ‘There you go, you could take over all these little 9-hole golf courses. You could run three of them.’ I still remember him scribbling that down. ‘Dad, that’s not possible.’
“And here we are! My goal ever since then was to run more than that.”
Leave it to parents who know next to nothing about one industry to inadvertently provide perfect advice. Rohlfsen’s dad, Bill, has been an entrepreneur all his working life, so juggling three, four, five, maybe even six projects isn’t unusual. Despite his initial ignorance about the turf industry, he has even developed products that were once used on golf courses.
After studying turfgrass and golf course management at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Rohlfsen, still just 21 years old, landed his first superintendent position at CARD Inc. Golf and Country Club in Clarksville. “I turned that golf course into a masterpiece,” he says with a laugh. “I figured it all out on my own. If I broke down, I was normally the only one there. The first couple years I was there, the irrigation didn’t start on its own, so I had to be out there at night to turn it on.”
Rohlfsen added Maple Hills to his responsibilities in 2007, then, when two courses proved to be not too much more challenging than one, worked as a consultant for Willow Run in 2008. Red Carpet Golf Course in Waterloo followed in 2012, then River Ridge Golf Course in Independence, Jesup, and Hickory Grove Golf Course in Oelwein all followed in 2014, Willow Run in 2016, Vinton in 2017 (and, after leaving in 2018, a return in 2021), and Dysart this year.
It sounds overwhelming. But Rohlfsen has it down to a science. Smartphones, simplicity, size and a Sentra are key.
“When I started out, I had a cellphone but not everybody had a cellphone,” Rohlfsen says. “So I’d call a clubhouse and leave a message, or ask, ‘What hole’s he on? Do you see him out there?’” His processes have evolved. He used to chart hours on Sunday nights for every crew member at every course — the current count is 29, all of them employed by the various courses and almost none of them full-timers, with Rohlfsen preferring they work only mornings with the rest of the day for themselves. Now he keeps everything in his head and texts each crew member Sunday night with a call Monday morning. Smartphones, he says, changed everything.
He also tends to keep crew members on one job, maybe two, rather than jumping from one to the next day to day, and he tends to be particular, if not exacting. “I used to flip it up all the time,” he says. “Someone else would do this, someone else would do that — but it’s easier for people to just get really good at something. … I have very, very specific ways I want things done, and to be honest with you, I don’t like to hire people who worked at other golf courses or are already working at the golf course when I take over, because they usually have habits I don’t like.” There are exceptions, but Rohlfsen still pursues uniformity.
The size of each course also plays into Rohlfsen’s system. The differences between 9- and 18-hole courses, he says, are enormous.
“I’ve worked at two different 18-hole courses and just to try to get everything done …,” He trails off in a rare moment of quiet. “If I wasn’t with you, I could cut cups in 20 minutes, easy. At an 18-hole golf course, it would take me two, three hours.” Everything at 18-hole courses is magnitudes larger. Three of the five courses Rohlfsen currently maintains are exactly 80 acres — half of a quarter section of farmland, a common size for courses developed during the 1960s Hawkeye State golf boom — with the other two about 60 acres. He can drive to any hole in minutes at most. At some courses, he can see the whole property from the maintenance building or the parking lot.
Speaking of parking lots, Rohlfsen steers clear of the golf course superintendent’s usual pickup truck for two unusual reasons. First, because each of his five courses operates under separate boards and with its own machinery, he almost never has to cart equipment or products from one stop to the next. Everything he needs is already on site. Second, each of the five courses is about 30 to 40 minutes, give or take, from his Cedar Falls home and the farthest distance between any two is just shy of 60 miles. Stopping at all five in the same day, which he normally does twice a year, totals almost 140 miles. Driving a Nissan Sentra just makes fuel-economy sense.
On the course, Rohlfsen is not a taskmaster, and he tends to be more of a golfer’s superintendent — “So many superintendents are so protective of their golf courses,” he says. “No carts! Ropes everywhere! That’s not how you make money. We want to make money. I want it to be a nice golf course, but you can’t baby the shit out of it” — but his top goal is pretty straightforward.
“All I want,” he says, “is for everything to be as perfect as possible at all times.”
Rohlfsen was fired one time, but not because he spread himself too thin and neglected the course. The board changed over and the new members just wanted a fulltime superintendent they could see every day. They later rehired him.
He has never worried about losing a position. He believes in the quality of his work, the quality of his work ethic, and his ability to improve the turf at any golf course. He tends to pick up new skills, too. He is quick to say he loves cutting cups — he cut all 27 at the three courses he visited on a recent Wednesday — but he dives into engines and is the mechanic at all five courses. He is also a state-licensed applicator. He formed an LLC to purchase products at a bulk rate. He even learned to make a variety of fancy coffee drinks alongside Sarah and he used to sing in heavy metal bands.
“I don’t even know how I’d do this without multiple courses,” he says. “I think I’d be bored to tears. I always say, there are 300 things you could do any day, you just have to do a couple things you know need to get done.”
Even though he is particular about training and can keep the needs of five different courses in his heads, Rohlfsen says he would prefer to keep working as a superintendent rather than develop into a course maintenance management company or system.
And can he maintain any more than five courses?
“Everyone always asks me, ‘Well, would you do more?’” he says. “Yeah, probably.”
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