DJ McClellan’s lunchtime can come at breakfast time.
“It’s like 8 o’clock in the morning, 9 o’clock in the morning, and they say, ‘Oh, I’m on my way to work,’” he says. “I could almost go eat lunch now.
“I’ve already put in an eight-hour day by the time you’re getting ready to go to work.”
Hours probably remain on his shift, too.
That’s good, though, McClellan thinks. His job as a golf-course superintendent is a forever job.
“I’ll probably do this until the day I die,” he said.
Jordan Booth would smile at that. He’s the senior director of the USGA’s course consulting service, and McClellan was a student at a program he helps guide, the USGA’s Greenskeeper Apprenticeship Program. Now in its fourth year and headed by Brett Rusek, the program brings aboard greenskeeper apprentices who go on to work at courses across the Pinehurst, N.C., and Myrtle Beach, S.C., areas — Pinehurst Resort among them — and study at either Sandhills Community College in Pinehurst or Horry-Georgetown Technical College in Conway, S.C. Apprentices are also not charged for the program, and they work full-time at courses.
The program touches all parts of greenskeeping.
“We identified this as a real challenge, workforce development in the game of golf, specifically in golf course maintenance,” Booth said. “So we started the greenkeeper apprenticeship program right here at Sandhills Community College.
“We feel like we’re really focused on folks that have maybe worked in the game of golf for five-plus years but don’t have that education to understand why we do what we do, right? They may know the how. What we feel like the apprenticeship program provides is the why.”
McClellan took all that in, though before the program, he admitted he’d been searching like most younger professionals.
“I really didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up,” he said with a laugh. Working in the golf shop at Pinehurst, he saw Booth.
“And he goes, ‘Hey, I’m interested,’ Booth said. “You know how personable he is, right? So DJ’s super-interested in working on the golf course, but he didn’t know how to do that. So he finished the apprenticeship program and went from not working in golf at all or at least golf course maintenance to being an apprentice to now being what we call a graduate.”
And now he’s a superintendent at Pinewild Country Club in Pinehurst. He’s the first graduate of the GAP program to be hired as a super. He said it’s changed his life.
Booth thinks he’ll be doing the work for a while, too.
“It’s a great honor to be able to represent the GAP program and to show somebody out there that’s just starting off in golf, hey, this is somewhere that I can get to,” McClellan said. “I just put my head down and worked hard and all the different things I’ve done, they’ve all been jobs. And now this is finally a career. I finally feel at home.
