Like the competitors at the 2024 U.S. Open, DJ McClellan is reading the greens carefully this week. He is tasked with monitoring soil-moisture levels on four putting surfaces at Pinehurst No. 2.
Championship setups require frequent tweaks, and McClellan, 36, knows all about adjustments. He’s made many in his life.
“You could say I’ve gone through a few things to get where I am today,” he says.
A North Carolina native, he started working in agriculture in his teens, farming cotton and other row crops, before following his father’s footsteps into law enforcement. For nearly seven years, he served as a sheriff’s deputy in a county jail, roughly an hour south of Pinehurst, a role he held until 2021.
“I’m an outdoor guy, and I didn’t like not being in sunlight,” McClellan says. Not working was not an option, though. Married, with a daughter, he had bills to pay. “I just knew that I was ready for something different.”
McClellan had always liked golf. He’d played it as a kid. But golf-course maintenance?
“I figured it was just cutting grass,” he says.
A fresh perspective came when McClellan caught wind of the USGA’s Greenskeeper Apprentice Program (GAP), an innovative initiative aimed at addressing a growing challenge in the industry. For golf-course operators, staffing has never been easy. In recent years, finding and retaining talent has only gotten tougher. In a 2022 member survey by the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, respondents cited workforce issues as their greatest challenge, ahead of course conditioning and revenue-generation, with 70 describing the labor market as “bad” or “very bad.”
No wonder, really. Many course-maintenance jobs are hourly positions that pay less than jobs of a similar skill level, and allow little room for moving up. Why wake up before dawn and bust your butt in what you perceive as a dead-end gig if you can earn as much or more driving an Uber?
That’s the crux of the problem. Its roots run deep. But so do the solutions offered by GAP. Anchored in the Carolinas, the program provides tuition-free education for aspiring golf-course maintenance professionals, paired with paid-on-the-job training at partner courses. Apprentices take a range of turf-related classes — soil science, plant fertility, irrigation, and on — then apply those lessons directly in the field.
The goal is to produce a skilled workforce with opportunities for advancement, backed by financial support that allows those workers to stick around to learn and grow — whether they are young people starting out or older candidates making mid-life career changes.
“It’s important to give people a sense of ownership in their jobs” says GAP program coordinator Carson Letot. “When you teach them the science behind what they’re doing and give them a chance to apply those learnings in the real world, it creates that sense of ownership. Those people are going to feel more committed to their jobs, and they’re more likely to stay in them.”
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