2025 Super Social Media Awards: Craig Moore

Imagine landing your dream job, your forever job, your career job before turning 28.

Craig Moore doesn’t need to imagine that. He just looks around the 36 holes at Marquette Golf Club in Marquette, Michigan — in the northern reaches of the Upper Peninsula, far closer to Canada than to Milwaukee or Minneapolis, much less Detroit — and tries to process natural perfection.

“It’s like you’re in a fairyland out here,” he says. “The trees turn and then the colors and the sky … I shake my head all day long at how beautiful it is. This place is amazing.”

Entering his 20th consecutive season at the club and 21st overall — he helped build it in 2003 before following his wife, Maggy, for two years as she earned her doctorate — Moore still has to pinch himself some days. Most days, though, he just snaps photos, jots down notes and shares some of what he picked up on his X account. Moore says his primary audience is his membership, but he posts plenty for regional superintendents in a region where only about a quarter of golf course superintendents have a formal turf education.

Now the club’s director of agronomy, Moore’s online presence earned him a Super Social Media Award. He’ll be honored alongside fellow award winners Wednesday, Feb. 5, at the Social Media Celebration at Aquatrols booth #4025 during the GCSAA Conference and Trade Show in San Diego. The ceremony begins at 2:30 p.m., PT. The event is open to all. Free drinks will be served before, during and after the ceremony.

Your feed is filled with fantastic photos of the work you and your team are doing, along with some Upper Peninsula glamour shots. Who do you view as your social media audience?

My focus is primarily the folks who are on the course playing. We set it up so people can see what’s going on up here. The membership really likes it, and there are a lot of out-of-towners who come and visit every year, and they love watching and seeing what’s going on and seeing what we’re doing. I get a lot of feedback from them: ‘Oh, that’s a great picture you posted. I love what you’re doing.’ But there is some stuff I post just for the whole turf community to see. I’m actually on the Michigan Turfgrass Foundation board. I like to promote what we’re doing there. And any regional stuff, I’ll repost.

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What sort of information do you like to post for other turf pros?

A lot of the smaller clubs in the U.P., they might not have somebody there who’s been trained or educated. I know of seven that do. The rest have someone who worked their way up. … I’ve met a lot of them over the years. I’ll post something and they’ll reach out and ask me a question about what’s going on, or why I was doing something.

There are so many small courses up here. They could be open, but they just kind of close down because it doesn’t make much sense to stay open during the shoulder season. Whereas for us, we have a huge membership so we stay open as long as we can.

How do you approach social media on a daily basis?

Stuff comes to me when it comes to me. I don’t put pressure on myself, like, ‘I gotta have something today!’ If there’s good stuff that needs to be thrown out there, I’ll put it out there. Or if I capture some good images, I might scroll through my phone, ‘Oh, that’s a really good picture. I should share that one.’

I drown out all the garbage that’s out there. A lot of people get caught up in stuff. I’m just going to keep it positive — it’s not going to be negative — and it’s going to be worthwhile. I’m not going to jump into any arguments. Discussions are good, but arguments are not.

Any must-follows?

I always like what the USGA puts out. They always put out good stuff and those are really good communication pieces for the membership, so I’ll retweet those and I’ll send a lot of those to the person who does our newsletter. Otherwise, it’s just trying to follow as many of the other superintendents in our region as I can and see what they’re doing, see what their weather is like, see what kind of challenges they’re facing. … Everybody has their own way of doing things, so it’s nice to be able to share on Turf Twitter and wonder, ‘Would that work for me?’ Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, because every place is unique.

Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.