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Tennesse Turfgrass – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com

How did you get into the turfgrass industry and end up where you are today?

I always loved the game of golf. My dad got me started super early, I started playing when I was first able to walk, basically. He put a club in my hand, and I grew up playing golf. Some of my fondest memories are going to the golf course with my dad at six o’clock in the morning on Saturday and Sunday, play golf at six, then be home by eleven o’clock, start the day. I was always around the golf course, and I came across an article in high school that college in SUNY Delhi was offering a class in turf management and I thought it would be interesting so I looked into that. I signed up, they accepted me and I started my turfgrass voyage, if you will. So I’ve been in the business now for over 25 years. I started back in 1996.

Where did you go from there – how did your path bring you to where you are now?

I grew up in Buffalo, New York. Actually a little city called Dunkirk, which is 40 miles southwest of Buffalo, New York. The winters there are pretty harsh, so it’s a six-month work window there in west New York. I had some relatives out in Las Vegas, so when I graduated college, I decided to go try to work in Las Vegas. I worked there for about a year, got kind of bored of it because it is literally just Vegas, there’s nothing else really around, except for casinos and golf courses.

Then I moved back home for six months. I had some family in the Carolinas, Greensboro, and I went down there for a weekend looking for a job, and a friend from back home called me and said that he heard that I was in the area, he happened to be in Charlotte, North Carolina and I went down there to visit him and they hired me on the spot as a second assistant superintendent, making nine dollars an hour, which at the time to me was an insane amount of money. I worked at Highland Creek as my first assistant job for about two years and eventually got picked up at Charlotte Country Club, where I spent ten years as senior assistant superintendent. I eventually moved on to River Hills Country Club, which was my first golf course superintendent job. I worked there for five years, and then interviewed here at Memphis Country Club and I’ve been here, starting my sixth year right now.

From those previous locations, and now that you are entrenched in Tennessee living there in Memphis, what has been a unique challenge of managing turfgrass where you are right now?

The weather. I thought it was going to parallel the Charlotte market, but it does not. The weather is just brutal. The summers, the humidity are just brutal, the heat. Then the winter – you’ve got some cold nights here. And then the rain, I did not expect all this rain. I think one year we had 78 inches, something like that. The winter months, we try to do a lot of project work. Cutting trees down, sod work, cart path repair… you struggle to get anything done because it’s either too wet or everything’s frozen. It’s tough, so the weather was my biggest shock moving here.

What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve had, not just there in Memphis, but in the turfgrass industry in general?

I would have to say it varies—I can’t believe I’m getting ready to say this – by decade almost. Originally, it was finding a job when I first started. It was breaking into being an assistant. I think colleges were churning kids out at the time and we had a hard time just finding an assistant’s position. So my first few years, it was just landing that assistant’s position. After that it was trying to grapple with member expectations – being a young assistant, learning to deal with all that… I don’t want to say heat, but the noise coming from members or guests. Highland Creek, my first course, was a public course, so you’d hear a lot of vocal opinions from the guests. You’d have to kind of dig through that feedback to find out what were the real issues out there.

When I was an assistant, I was an assistant for ten years. Not by choice, because we couldn’t find a superintendent position at the time. Even in the Carolinas – it’s very competitive, there’s golf courses that have assistants ten deep right now in the Carolinas just because the market is very tight right now. So breaking into that superintendent role was pretty difficult. And right now, it’s the labor. The labor market is just terrible. We raised our rate of pay up, and we still are not competitive with the housing market, the construction, the landscapers, the roofers. We cannot pay competitive with that, not to mention Memphis being a hub for Nike, FedEx, you name it, with all these warehouses… they’re paying warehouse workers in some instances $20 an hour to work in the air conditioning. So we’re paying what we’re paying, it’s tough to compete with that, especially when you’re outside, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in 100 degree heat, nobody really wants to do that right now.

How do you adjust operations when there is such a struggle?

We’ve got a core staff that have really stuck with us, so I’ve got a base of assistants that have been here. For instance, my one assistant, Mario, has been here almost 30 years now. So he knows this property better than anybody. I’ve got another, younger gentleman that’s been with us two years and we sit down, we plan every day out. Whether the day before and then I call him up on my ride to work and I say, “Hey, what are we going to do today? Has anybody called you, is anybody sick, have they texted you?” Because half the time, it’s dealing with, “Hey, I’m not going to make it.” So we plan the schedule out the day before and we know what we need to get done each week and we’ve got ways around that. We can’t walk mow greens every day like we used to. So some days we’re triplexing, some days we might have to skip raking bunkers to get other projects done. So it’s just structuring your day and taking the time out to plan well in advance of what obstacles you might run into.

Has that networking with other people in your position across the state through TTA been helpful to you when it’s time to adjust to the challenges that probably all of you are facing?

No doubt. I go back to the Carolinas. I worked my way up, I was eventually the president of our local there, the Carolinas, the Charlotte chapter. So I spent about eight years on that board until I was president. The networking with everybody – knowing the vendors, other superintendents, the peers in the market, makes a huge difference. Being able to pick the phone up and say, “Hey, I’m short four guys. How are you guys getting by with ten guys where I’m used to having fifteen? How are you doing it? Walk me through your day.” Those conversations are priceless. To be able to call up a superintendent in Nashville, Chattanooga, and for me Carolinas, even, to discuss pay rates and how often people are mowing greens or raking bunkers. That’s invaluable.

Do you have a mentor in the industry?

John Szklinski over at Charlotte Country Club, he’s still the superintendent out there. He came to Charlotte in 2007. It was an interesting time. I was a senior assistant. They had let go of the previous superintendent in 2006 and they called me into the office and said, “You’re going to be the interim superintendent until we find somebody, and by the way, we’re starting a complete golf course renovation project in November. So go ahead and start planning for that.”

John didn’t arrive until March, so we had everything planned out, and John and I clicked from day one. I talk to him probably twice a month now still and bounce a ton of ideas off of him, ask him tons of questions. He’s a friend and a mentor and I definitely wouldn’t be where I am right now without him.

What do you do in your free time? Do you still get to play some golf?

I try. I think I played six rounds this year, maybe seven. My wife Jennifer and I have two small children. My son Tyler turns six and my daughter Teagan just turned four in August. So we’re tied up with soccer and baseball doing homework. My son’s in kindergarten now so believe it or not, it blows my mind that they send these kids home with homework in kindergarten, so we’re doing that and running around. So it’s tough to get out and play golf, especially with the hours we’re putting in here. But I try. My parents followed me down here to see their grandkids, they live in Munford, so it’s nice to get out and play golf with my dad whenever I can still. Other than that, when I do have some down time, I enjoy reading, non-fiction, history type stuff and just relaxing.

What would be your advice for someone thinking about a career in the turfgrass industry?

I still think it’s a great industry to get into. You’re basically guaranteed a job for life. I still say that because you can literally call up any golf course in any market and say, “Hey, I’m in the business, are you looking to hire?” And they’ll hire you to sit on a mower, walk mow, assistant, irrigation tech… you can get a job. It has its ups and downs like everything else. It’s great that we get to work outside year-round, but the downside is, we’re working outside year-round depending on where you’re at. It’s been great for me and my family, I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to a lot of great golf courses and a lot of great events. Like anything else though, you get out of it what you put into it. It’s a lot of hard work, it’s a lot of networking, it takes a lot of your spare time, even outside of work to get to where I feel like I’m at right now. It’s not always as easy as it seems to sit in that superintendent’s chair. It’s not all about growing grass anymore, it’s political game. What you learn in school is great, but the real lessons are learned in the superintendent’s chair – you’ve got to feel that weight as a superintendent to really grasp and respect that position.