PennWest California program charts path for career in golf
PennWest California is offering students instruction to find a career in one of the many areas of golf.
The Professional Golf Management (PGM) program provides knowledge and skills necessary for success in the golf industry.
Program director James “JR” Pond explained that the first group of students for the program came on board in 2005. PGM was initially designed by Justin Barroner, chair of the Department of Exercise, Health and Sports Sciences.
“Professional Golf Management is a concentration within that department,” Pond explained.
“A lot of the classes are PGM specific that cover everything from teaching and coaching to business operations of a golf course to facility management. There’s also appreciation classes that you would need to know from a business standpoint like food and beverage management, turf grass management. As a golf professional there are so many different areas of the business that you can work in, you need to make sure it at least creates a foundation in each of these different areas.”
Typically, the program has 80 students in a given school year. Pond said that is an ideal number, allowing for more one-on-one time between faculty and students.
“We only bring in about 20-25 students a year,” he said. “We do that on purpose. It’s designed to be a little bit smaller than some of the other PGM programs that exist. Because there’s so many different areas that you can go into in the industry, each student comes in and has a little different passion or pathway where they’re trying to find out where their niche is. We want to know what those are. We want to help students pursue the areas that they’re most interested in. That requires us to get to know them. They just can’t be a number on the board or a name on the wall. We meet with all of our students multiple times a semester.”
Shawn Luce, 19, of Skaneateles, N.Y., came upon the program when trying to determine a field of study for a potential career.
“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I was going to college,” Luce said. “I’ve loved golf all my life. I was just going to go for general business and I saw Professional Golf Management, so I took an interest in it. I could see myself working as a professional in the golf world for the rest of my life. I started visiting schools and landed at PennWest California.”
Luce, an exercise science major with a minor in business, is the vice president of the Professional Golf Management Student Society. He hopes to one day be a golf teaching instructor.
Clay Sipple, 20, of Connellsville, is in his third year as a student at PennWest California and majors in sports management. He is working toward a minor in Marketing.
Sipple admits to a love of the sport, saying he tries to hit golf balls every day and get to a course a couple times a week.
While a sophomore in high school, Sipple began working at the Pleasant Valley Golf Club as a cart boy. That sparked his interest in a career in golf, hopefully as a head professional at a country club or a golf club.
“It’s great,” Sipple said of PGM. “You walk into the facility and the classroom and everybody knows you by name. The instructors make it really personalized and that really helps with learning.”
“The connections are amazing,” Luce added. “I never thought I’d be going to certain places while at such a small school.”
A requirement for students in the program is to run the annual Tee It Up Fore Tots charity event at the Nemacolin Country Club, which raises money for the Children’s Institute of Pittsburgh.
“It’s a class project for one of our courses,” Pond said. “They’re learning what it’s like not only as a golf professional but also on the non-profit side. They have to find the players and they get the donation baskets and everything else put together. The students rally around it..”
Students in the program participate in five internships throughout their college career, spending 16 months in the field, connecting with golf industry professionals.
Internships have taken place at prestigious private clubs and resorts throughout the country, such as Congressional Country Club in Maryland, Pebble Beach in California, Laurel Valley Golf Club in Ligonier, The Greenbrier in West Virginia and the Oakmont Country Club. Many alumni from the program work at clubs throughout the country.
Students also have done internships at international golf courses in Asia, Europe and South America.
“They’re literally everywhere around the world,” Pond said. “Primarily, most of our students stay in the United States, but we regularly have had students work on the northern coast of Ireland with Rosapenna Golf Resort. Almost every year in the last decade or more, with the exception of the COVID years, we’ve had students who’ve elected to do that because it’s a really cool resort and it’s something different.”
Pond said the farthest a student has traveled for an internship is the Kingdom of Bhutan.
Sipple has done internships at Westmoreland Country Club in Export and will return there this summer.
“The head pro there is an alumni of our PGM program,” Sipple said. “I think it’s great. I feel a lot more prepared each year to go out and work in the golf industry.”
Luce said he has done an internship at the Onondoga Golf & Country Club in Fayetteville, N.Y., and has an internship planned at East Hampton Golf Club this summer.
“It provides a real-world scenario,” Luce said of the internships. “You might not have a major role in the day-to-day operations, but you start getting experience so when you’re out of college and have a full-time job, you understand how it works and what you need to do.”
The PGM program has been a springboard for quite a few jobs in the professional golf world.
“We have had a 100% percent job rate since it started,” Luce said. “There are some really cool places where alumni have full-time jobs.”
One internship involves the students participation in a program called Birdie Basic with the Rutledge Center for Early Childhood Education for kids between the ages of 3-6.
“This is something that students use as an internship, but what it allows them to do is use golf as a vehicle to work on cognitive, social and physical development,” Pond said. “We’ve been running this on campus as a way to support what the Rutledge Center stands for.”
A huge part of PGM is the indoor lab, which Sipple said is called “The Forge,” that includes two golf simulators, three hitting bays, a 1,200- square-foot artificial putting surface, club repair equipment, loft lie machine, putting lab and a doppler radar system to track things such as club head speed, ball speed, initial launch,and spin rates. There are plans to put in an optic-based system with a quadraphonic camera that would take high quality pictures to calculate the same algorithms the radar system does.
“These are technologies the students see when they go out on internships,” Pond said. “We want this to be tangible for them before they go out on the internships. Our goal is to produce PGA professionals, so we made sure they have the ability to work on their games even if the weather outside isn’t conducive to them working on their game.”
PGM students also are giving lessons to fellow students, as well as PennWest California staff, as part of the program’s curriculum.
“It’s our version of student teaching for golf instructors,” Pond said. “The lessons give our students valuable experience in the business aspect of golf. From developing a lesson plan to teaching their students, the experience they get from helping the Cal community is something that they can take with them when they begin their career in golf.”
Pond was a student in the program in 2006, entering the college as a non-traditional student at the age of 25. He was actually its first graduate.
“Golf had always been a part of my life,” he said. “I had an associate’s degree from Westmoreland County Community College, went down to Florida for a while and came back. Golf was always a part of it when I was in Florida. I realized this is something that’s important to me that I wanted to be doing.”
He worked as an assistant golf professional at the Valley Brook Country Club in McMurray for six years and as head pro at Lone Pine Country Club for five years before joining the PennWest California faculty in August, 2017.
“It’s hidden in plain sight to the campus community,” Pond said. “We let people in all the time to see it with some of the programs that we run. Most people don’t realize that we have a million dollar facility.”.