Editor’s notebook: Face-to-face financial chatter (and fun)

A rainbow’s worth of bowling balls are hurtling down the lanes inside Bowlero Major League in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and pins are falling — six, eight, occasionally even 10 at a time. There are high fives and fist bumps and plenty of beers poured into glass mugs from tall, sweating pitchers.

Renee Geyer is pouring at least one of those beers and Sally Jones is picking up no fewer than three of those impressive strikes. A lane over, Phillip Fischer is notching mark after mark on his way to topping 170 and looking like a league regular. Geyer is the superintendent at Canterwood Golf and Country Club in Gig Harbor, Washington, Jones is the general manager and superintendent at Benson Golf Club in Benson, Minnesota, and Fischer is the assistant superintendent at Brickyard Crossing at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Other superintendents and turf pros are all around them — two dozen in all, along with half a dozen or so other industry professionals — eating, drinking and, most important, sprinkling the water of life that is shared experience and struggle on new friendships.

Welcome to an after-hours night at the 14th annual Syngenta Business Institute, a four-day education experience designed for superintendents seeking to learn more about how to manage balance sheets, people and their own lives.

Introduced by Syngenta in 2009, the program has now welcomed 340 turf pros over the last 13 years — with this class the first to attend in person at Graylyn Estates, just outside the Wake Forest University campus, since 2019. Like so many other annual events, the last two editions were hosted on Zoom.

Syngenta turf market manager Stephanie Schwenke described those virtual events as “a great opportunity for us to accommodate superintendents who likely would never have been able to make it here in person because their GMs or managers wouldn’t allow them a week away. It requires a lot of justification. But the networking was not the same.”

“I think even the attendees have noticed a difference,” said Mark LaFleur, communication lead for turf & landscapes for Syngenta, “because the number of applications that we got now versus virtually went right back up.”

Syngenta and the Wake Forest School of Business faculty who teach each three-and-a half-hour lesson have an effective formula: Interactive sessions on leading individuals and teams, leading across cultures and generations, effective negotiations, financial management, leadership and decision-making, and work-life balance, with each budgeted for about half a day — not nearly a full semester of information, but far deeper than surface level and more than enough to take back to the course to help improve operations and attitudes. The program is tweaked a bit every year, with updated data and information where needed and one new faculty member making their in-person debut.

Superintendents follow along in binders as thick as those that might line maintenance facility shelves and be packed with historical data about clipping yields and plant protectant applications. They will be carried back to those same shelves, where they will be referred to for years to come.

“So many takeaways to take back to my team, to my membership — to my home life, really,” said Craig Hilty, the superintendent at Rogue Valley Country Club in Medford, Oregon. “Met a lot of really great people who I would not have met. It was just a wonderful experience.”

“The biggest takeaway for me is just that each year I’m in this it’s becoming more and more about people than it is about turf,” said Jason Hollen, now the superintendent at Pete Dye Golf Club in Bridgeport, West Virginia, after a 12-year run at nearby Stonewall Resort. “And I see my role shifting more toward developing the guys who are going to take my place.”

Both Hilty and Hollen cited the session about leading across cultures and generations.

“I’ve got all four generations on my crew,” Hollen said. “I’m (Generation) X and it opened up my eyes to some of the things that I’ve seen and go, ‘Wait a second, that’s why they’re reacting the way they are.’”

“It gave us an opportunity to learn about them too,” Hilty added.

This year also marked the first time any women attended the program since 2010, when Nancy Dickens, now the director of golf at Westin Kierland Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, traveled to North Carolina. Geyer and Jones were joined by Jill Seymour, the superintendent at Charleston Springs Golf Course in Lincroft, New Jersey. The three met in 2019 and have since formed a grass ceiling-shattering society, texting with a dozen or so other women turf pros almost every day — and meeting up on Zoom about every month — and volunteering for each of the last two U.S. Women’s Opens.

Geyer, who moved to Washington last year after a dozen years at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, called her week at the program a “fantastic professional development (and a) great networking opportunity that I would not have had with people who are all of the like-minded and elevated level.

“You don’t always get that in a networking summit. Everybody’s at that level that we can have those higher-thought conversations.”

“We’re very excited to see three females in attendance because it shows acceptance in the golf industry,” Schwenke said. “The golf industry is evolving, there truly are female superintendents and GMs in the marketspace and they want to be at the table, they want higher education, and they would like to evolve in their profession.”

“And the thing that’s important is it’s not only that the men are evolving to be more accepting, it’s that the women are evolving to look for more opportunities,” LaFleur said. “And women are recognizing this as an opportunity and recognizing that they have every right to be here. I was excited to see three women apply — and they were some of the best applications.”

Much of this year’s class will reunite at the 2023 GCSAA Conference and Trade Show, in Orlando. So will so many from the 13 other SBI classes. There will be virtual gatherings too, along with Twitter hashtags and text threads.

But nothing beats face to face.