Week 5 Post 3

Up to this point, the driving range has been done differently because there haven't been that many people there to use it. There is a new method that my supervisor and the head groundskeeper have come up with for the season, and this week we started to implement it. There are arrows at the front, back, and sides of the range indicating where the balls should be aligned on the range. This way we can leave the bag-racks out there so we just have to move the balls back and forth from the cart barn. This week my supervisor and I brought a bunch of new range balls out because the ones that we had been using were getting pretty old and a lot of them were scuffed. The range has always been a bit of a problem because there are tennis courts just to the left of them, and often times there are golf balls that fly into the courts. We try to limit the range to 150 yards, but it is tough to make people listen to that. This week I also talked to my supervisor about interviewing the Titlesist rep for my research paper. Unfortunately the club doesn't carry Nike, so I won't be able to get in touch with anyone from Nike, but that is pretty helpful being able to talk to the Titleist rep. I really do enjoy working at the club, and the assistants keep telling me that I will be able to do more at this internship than I will probably do working at the courses I will intern at during college. So this is a great experience for me to have.

Week 5 Post 2

The golf season still hasn't really gotten into full swing yet, so the weeks are still pretty slow. I have been doing a lot of inventory things because we have been getting a lot of packages with new stuff for the summer. One of the assistants has kind of taken me under her wing because she was most recently in the PGM program at Methodist. She is showing me the tricks that she has for running tournaments and stuff. She was the one who taught me how to use the tournament pairing program to set up all the tournaments. We still have to create lists of players on excel, but for the most part all of the organizing of tournaments happens through the TPP. Since there isn't that much going on during the week I spend a lot of time in the assistants office working on the computer. This week I actually finished all of the sign up sheets through the month of June, but what I have started to notice is that there are always a bunch of people that cancel or want to play last minute. So there are always a million things that we need to change before we make our final copies of everything. It is tedious when we have to make changes all the time, but once the tournaments start it is a good feeling knowing that you were part of the reason that everything went so smoothly. It is much more satisfying than just cleaning clubs and moving carts.

Week 5 Post 1

We had a couple of tournaments this week, and instead of strictly being on the outside staff, I was involved in the work that the assistants were doing. I helped make the scorecards for the Women's event along with the alpha sheet for the players. I have assumed a lot more responsibilities at the club, and although it is a little intense, I like the sense of independence that it give me. Today I had to handle the money for the caddies that worked over the weekend for the member-member tournament. It was a shotgun start, so everyone came in at the same time. Unfortunately this meant that everyone was trying to pay their caddies at the same time, and we only had three pens at the table. I was trying to juggle the 62 members asking for their chits, the 20 something caddies looking for their money, and the number of members that left things in their bags and needed them back. I had been responsible for bringing the caddies their money before, but that didn't involve counting and separating and signing the chits and all the things that I was doing today. This was one of the longer days I have had at the shop. After the tournament finished up I had to close by myself as well. There were a couple of people out on the course and I had to wait for them to finish before I could lock the shop, so I was there for about an hour by myself. It feels pretty good knowing my boss trusts me that much.

Week 4 Post 3

Other than meeting with the reps and listening to that conversation between Ping and my supervisor, I did a lot of the same stuff last week as before. We got more apparel and clothing that I had to put into the inventory and organize in the shop. I had to move some shelves around and organize clothes by color, which I have no natural talents for, and I had to hang up mannequins. I actually made a couple sales this week to some new members looking for jackets and sweaters. I was proud of myself. I have learned a lot from this internship so far, and I have actually learned quite a bit about hiring people as well. I mentioned before that we were a little short on staff, but Tom has hired a few people recently. Some new outside staff and one of the old pros from last year are starting this week. There was another man who applied for an assistants job, but he ended up not taking the job. I got to watch how the whole application and interview process went, which was pretty cool to see just because it was a lot different from when I applied to work outside. I think my supervisor is a little more cautious now because he already had to fire one of their new assistants this summer. Doing this for SCORE really is going to give me a leg up on everyone that is going to be in the Golf Management Program at Penn State.

Week 4 Post 2

There wasn't a ton of golf this week, so I spent a lot of time in the shop answering phones with my supervisor. He is a very good teacher, so he was talking to me a lot about everything really. One of our staff members had bought a set of irons a couple summers ago from a young guy who was new to the fitting business. He had only been working for a couple months at a small golf outlet store when he fit our staff member, Steve, who is a pretty solid golfer. He has won a couple small events, but the last couple seasons he had been having a lot of trouble, so my supervisor fit him again to see if his clubs were fit properly. Unfortunately he found that his lie angle of the face of the club at contact was off by about 4 degrees, which doesn't seem like a lot, but when a ball is going 600 feet, that 4 degrees can throw it off line quite a bit. These were Ping clubs, and my supervisor is very close with Ping. He was actually the Ping Fitter of the Year last year, so making that phone call was something he really didn't want to do. He was trying to see if they could just exchange the shafts so the club face would be at the right angle, but it is a tough process. Listening to that phone call taught me a lot just by the way he carried himself. He was saying how he supports Ping, and he doesn't want them to get a bad reputation simply because some kid at a small golf shop didn't know how to fit someone properly. I am not sure what the final decision was with Ping, but just listening to the way the phone call happened was a good experience.

Week 4 Post 1

This week I met some of the reps from the companies that the club does business with. I learned a lot from that experience. I never knew that there was one specific person that clubs always did business with, but every company sends the same person to the same clubs every time. I knew before that reps came but I never knew it was the same person from each company. It was good for me to see that the relationships that the reps and the pros have is more of a friendly relationship than an intense serious relationship. Obviously they are there to do business, but they are in contact with each other very often, so it is a good thing to be more comfortable with them. 

In addition to meeting some of the reps, this week I put in a lot of different lists of players for upcoming tournaments into the computer. This is pretty easy because I just have to copy a list of names into an excel document, but once those tournaments get here I will have to organize their tee times and make their scorecards. The only difficulty when putting in players is with guests. When they are from other clubs and don’t send us their handicap information, it is not in our computer system, so I have to do some research to figure out how to stroke their scorecards. Other than that creating the player list is pretty easy. I don’t mind doing work on the computers.

Week 3 Post 3

There are a lot of things that I have to do on my own at the golf course now. This week was the first time that I had to close by myself, and it was pretty nerve wracking. I made sure that I went through everything I had to do about 6 times so nothing was wrong. There is a lot of pressure when the whole golf shop is resting on your shoulders. Fortunately everything went well and there were no problems. A couple people made purchases after the register was closed so I had to leave notes so they could be charged the next morning. Earlier that day I was actually alone in the shop, and all of a sudden there was a rush of people. Two members were looking to buy clothes while a couple other people were looking to sign up for town golf. Of course I had no idea how to sign people up for town golf, so I frantically searched for the town golf binder and I really just had to wing it from there... All I knew was that they needed proof of living in Manchester. Luckily I had them sign the right things and I even recorded their checks the right way. I was pretty impressed with myself because I literally had no idea what to do with the people signing up for town golf, and this was all happening at once. To say the least, it was an exciting ten minutes alone in the shop.

Week 3 Post 2

As I have been spending more time inside the golf shop, I have learned a lot more about the little skills you need to be able to be a good golf professional. One thing that I never thought I would have to be good at was wrapping presents, but I was wrong. When people shop in the golf shop they actually like to buy gifts for other people! So having them wrapped and looking good is pretty important. I have never been good at wrapping presents and I don't think I will ever be as good as my boss is, but it was a start. The shop at the club has a wrapping paper tool that spins so you can cut the exact amount of paper you need. That will obviously help because I would otherwise have no idea how much paper to use. I am also an awful folder. If you ask me to fold a t-shirt I will do a horrible job no matter how hard I try. I am okay at folding towels because you just need to fold those in half and then in half again and they look fine, but shirts and sweaters and things are just not my forte. They will be a wrinkled mess if you ask me to fold them. The management of all those things around the shop has probably been the most challenging part for me. I am not particularly an artsy person, so anything that involves color coordinating and that stuff I just struggle with.

Week 3 Post 1

This past week I finished organizing the opening tournament for the weekend. It was called the Donald Ross Trophy, and it is actually pretty tough to do. There were originally only 11 people that had signed up to play in the event, so we had everything ready to go by Wednesday, but then some people cancelled and we had about 6 or 7 people call and ask to play. That meant we had to remake the player list a bunch of times and the groups had to be changed over and over, which is a very tedious process on the software that the club has for organizing events. We have to go through to every player in the tournament and make sure their handicaps got marked correctly on the scorecards, and their groups were appropriate, and all that stuff every time we add a player. The only thing that wouldn't change when we had to add or take a player off the list was the rules sheet explaining the format for the event. For the Donald Ross the overall champion was the low gross player after 36 holes, but if you wanted to you could pick up on a hole and choose to only compete in the net division. Everything ran smoothly over the weekend and it was a really good experience for me to have. It was pretty cool to see a tournament happen that you helped organize. I definitely like the new responsibilities I have at the club.

Week 2 Post 3

This past week I had to do a lot of the dirty work that comes along with running a golf shop. We got in a new line of clothes from Brooks Brothers, and of course we needed to find a perfect way to present these new clothes to the members, so my job for the day was to figure out where to put the shirts and how to arrange them throughout the shop. That really isn't my strong suit considering I have no sense of fashion or style, and I am not much of a decorator. This was actually one of the harder things I have had to do because I honestly had no idea how everything should be around the shop. I hadn't given it much thought to that point because I never really pick up on the way things are arranged anywhere.

Other than being shown the appropriate way of rearranging clothes, I also learned that when a club is understaffed, it is important that everyone pitches in. The internships at Essex are inside doing things like answering phones, organizing tournaments, and making sales, but on Friday the club was rocking, and we are limited on outside staff right now. This meant that both my boss and I had to work outside cleaning clubs and moving carts and bags. Most of the outside staff only works in the summer because it is generally college and high school students that are busy during the weeks when they have school. This was a pretty good lesson for me so if I am a head professional I know before hand to have extra staff help during the school year.

Week 2 Post 2

In the first week of SCORE, I was shown how to record whatever shipments of clubs or clothing that we received into the log that the pro shop has. Yesterday and today I have been putting this information into the computer so we have it all in inventory. Every different item that we receive has its own category on the computer, so yesterday we got mens irons, and those had to be recorded in the mens irons category. This program on the computer also prints labels for whatever we receive. We have to go through papers from each vendor that we get products from to find the invoice, and then in the program we put in that price to determine how much it goes at retail price, and how much we charge the members. Until the season gets going I will be doing a lot of this work, and once there are more people at the club every day, I will be answering phones more and ringing up people when they buy something out of the shop. The software that we use is called Jonas, and they have showed me a little bit about how to use that, but it seems pretty straight forward. I will definitely learn a lot during SCORE, which bodes well for when I get to the PGM program in college and have a bunch of different internships then. There is a lot more that has to be done behind the scenes than I thought. Just running a tournament is a lot of work.

Week 2 Post 1

This week I will be learning about all of the different things that have to be done in order to run a golf tournament. I have started using the TPP (Tournament Pairing Program) to learn how to organize tee times, different pairings, and figure out the handicaps of all the different golfers that have signed up for tournaments. The challenging thing about this is that every tournament is different, so some tournaments you may have invitations that go out to a variety of clubs, and these could be through email or through the mail, and some tournaments people just sign up for and we have to keep track of all of the different sign ups and players in each event. The TPP program also designs different scorecards in case there are some tournaments that have a different style of play. So if it is a net tournament, the handicaps will be posted on the cards, and every hole that the player receives a stroke will have a dot. If it is a best ball tournament, then we can put in an extra row on the scorecards for that to be recorded. Since it is early in the season, we only have the lists of players for a couple tournaments, but it is a good start so I can get experience with the program before there is a ton of play at the course. I was also given a bunch of different documents that I will have to do in college, so this SCORE project is really going to help me be prepared for what I will be required to do in college.

Joshua: Week 1 Post 3

On Friday there were not many golfers at all due to the poor weather, so there was not a whole lot to do. One of the assistants had me log on to the PGA Links website to explore a little bit. That website has just about everything that a person might need to know about golf, but only certified professionals have access to the website. I was looking mainly at the financial information about the golf industry, which is more than a 68 billion dollar industry. It creates a ton of jobs and is really one of the few bright spots helping the economy right now. The PGA Links website is loaded with information.

Friday I also did some research for my research paper and found a lot of interesting things about the possible Nike and Titleist merge. Right now it actually appears that Fila Korea is discussing deals with Fortune Brands to buy out the Titleist sector of the company. Fortune Brands is either selling out or spinning off most of its divisions that are not related to adult drinks. They are trying to narrow their focus to just alcohol and get rid of all the different sectors like Titleist. Although there are talks about Nike being involved, it doesn't seem like they are going to be the ones to buy Titleist. This would by far be the biggest transaction in the history of the golf industry because Titleist and Nike are two power houses in the industry, and currently are sponsoring the top golfer in the world and the golfer who finished at number one in the world last season when he was sponsored by Titleist. It will be interesting to see how this develops as the golf season moves forward.

Week 1 Post 2

Since the golf course has not been open, I have been doing a lot of work in preparation for the opening of the course, which is today. I have been learning how to take invoices of new shipments, and I have also been learning about how to present these new items throughout the shop. It seems like there is a lot that I need to know to be able to keep track of all of these things, and this is a good experience for me to get a step ahead in college. For all of the demo golf clubs that will be in the shop, we need to make sure that none of them get damaged in any way, so I have been practicing applying the protective tape to the clubs. They have taught me how to print out labels for the prices of the golf clubs. There are a lot of things that I didn't know about that go on behind the scenes at a golf course. Pretty soon my supervisor is going to start giving me some books that I am going to be using in college so I can have more knowledge about what I will be studying then. I think this is a good choice for me to being doing an internship here because I am doing a lot of work that assistants and interns would be doing at any other course. Today was opening day, but the weather hasn’t been great so I haven’t been doing a whole lot.

Post 1

Today I set up a folder on the computer at the Essex County Club for any documents that I will get or any work that I will do for SCORE. I also went through a calendar and organized all of the times that I can and cannot work because of sports and AP classes. My supervisor had me write a short little blip about what my goals were for the SCORE internship. At least for this week I won't be doing a lot other than unpacking products that will be sold in the pro shop. The course does not open until Friday, and I will be helping out to get everything set up for when the course does open. I talked about what my research paper was going to be, so we could maybe relate the work I am doing to that. This will make writing the paper a little bit easier. My major in college is going to be Professional Golf Management, so I also talked about how I want to learn the skills that are necessary in that program. We are going to try to base the focus of my internship on those certain things that will help me get ahead before I enter the Golf Management program in the fall. I think that this internship is going to help a lot for me. It will give me some real life experience in the golf industry before I go off to college and learn more about it there.

Josh Christopher's Outline

Josh Christopher

Score Outline and Thesis

Golf Management Project

Research Topic:

The history of Titleist and Nike Golf

Thesis:

Creating a successful business is a very complicated and challenging process, but the histories of Nike and Titleist are a good way to see how different companies can get ahead in their industry.

P1: Beginnings of Titleist

How the company was started (who, where, etc..)

Early history of the company (how it started to grow)

Ambassador Scott Stallings / John Merrick

P2: Foreign connections

South Korean origins and how it was brought to the US

Being a sector of Acushnet, which was a subsidiary of Fortune Brands

P3: General history of Titleist

First golfers sponsored/biggest deals

Any buyouts or company changes

History of sales, most popular sales

Any other info/facts about Titleist

P4: Possible new parent for Titleist

Fortune Brands going to split

Other possible futures for Titleist

http://www.titleist.com/teamtitleist/b/tourblog/archive/2013/02/18/titleist-brand-ambassador-john-merrick-highlights-5-win-week-for-titleist-golf-ball-players.aspx

http://www.pga.com/titleist-and-footjoy-could-be-spun-off-or-sold-parent-company-breaks

http://golf.about.com/b/2010/11/15/is-titleist-going-to-become-a-nike-brand.htm

P5: Beginnings of Nike Golf

Who/How the company started…

Early history of the company

Bob Wood’s plan for Nike golf

P6: Footwear Boom

Mark Bisbing spreads Nike as Marketing Manager

Beginnings in Spain

P7: General History of Titleist

First golfers sponsored/biggest deals

Any buyouts or company changes

History of sales, most popular sales

Any other info/facts about Titleist

P8: Nike could possibly take over Titleist?

Competition with Nike and Callaway to take over Titleist if it does leave Acushnet

Signing of Rory McIlroy from Titleist

P9: How they did it

Similarities between the two companies

Publicity techniques and ad methods

Distribution and sales of products

Conclusion

The two companies are very much at the top of the golf industry and could possibly become one in the near future if Titleist is to separate from Fortune Brands and Acushnet.

http://www.oregonlive.com/playbooks-profits/index.ssf/2013/01/nike_golfs_roots_trace_to_1984.html

http://www.golf.com/photos/biggest-deals-golf-history/rory-mcilroy-golfs-biggest-business-deals

http://nikeinc.com/news/rory-mcilroy-signs-with-nike-golf

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