Special Awards Feature
With a Mindset to Help Others, Mark Bacheldor Receives the 2020 Professional Development Award
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he Professional Development Award is designed to recognize a Colorado PGA Member for his or her outstanding and continuing contributions in developing and improving educational opportunities for the PGA golf professional. It has recently been renamed from the Horton Smith Award, but its prestige and honor remain the same. This year’s recipient knows educational opportunities extremely well as he is the Program Director of the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs PGA Golf Management Program. Congratulations to Mark Bacheldor, PGA!
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UCCS Campus and was able to join the program in 2004, its second year of existence. Bacheldor’s final internship of the PGA Program was at the United States Air Force Academy. After graduation in 2008, he continued to work there at the Eisenhower Golf Club for five golf seasons as the Head Golf Professional.
Bacheldor was raised in Aurora, Colorado, in what he describes as a “very non-golf family.” He found golf in high school on his own after picking up an old bag and some mismatched clubs at Goodwill. He would hit balls into an open field until he would finally get into trouble from the neighbors. He quickly liked the game and was able to make the high school golf team in his junior and senior years.
In the fall of 2012, Bacheldor returned to the UCCS PGA Golf Management Program as the Internship Coordinator and became the PGA Golf Management Program Director in 2018. He has been teaching PGA curriculum for more than eight years in the UCCS PGA PGM Program. One impact he has had there is in refining the delivery of material to improve student testing rates. The pass rates have improved from 74% to 90% percent over the past six years. This means that more students are retained in the program, more graduate and more become PGA Members.
As he was finishing high school and exploring career paths, the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs was just launching the PGA Golf Management Program. He learned about it as a senior, visited the
Continuing to learn is what Bacheldor does and believes in for himself and others. He completed two certifications in the PGA Certified Program; Golf Operations and Teaching and Coaching. Achieving the
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