Outgoing President Pat Karnick
Incoming President Judd Duininck
SIT DOWN WITH THE GCBAA LEADERS –
Pat Jones
O
ur good friend Pat Jones had a chance to catch-up with GCBAA Outgoing President Pat Karnick and incoming President Judd Duininck to capture a little more about the two leaders of the association.
The Wadsworth Way The Chicago burbs have always been kind of a launching pad for successful folks in the golf business. Countless top superintendents, world-class designers and trailblazing owners hail from the Windy City. The place is breeding ground for industry talent. Growing up in Glen Ellyn, Pat Karnick didn’t have a clue about any of that. He’d played golf a bit, but it wasn’t a passion. He happily headed south to the University of Illinois to study computer science without a thought of golf in his head. But, it turned out he wasn’t a fan of being inside a stuffy building writing computer code all day long. The idea of working outdoors was far more appealing so he switched to landscape architecture and loved it. He finished his degree and made it a career. Then, fate intervened. “Every day on my way to work at my first real job out of college, I drove by an office that said, ‘Dick Nugent, Golf Course Architect,’ Karnick recalls.
“Every day, I’d see it and think ‘You know, that sounds like a neat thing to do.’ So, one day I pulled into his office with a portfolio of all my landscape architecture drawings and stuff from school that I had put together. This was 1989 and Bob Lohman, Jeff Brauer, Jim Engh, Bruce Borland and all those guys had recently left Nugent’s office to go to work for Nicklaus or go out on their own. So, Dick has a bunch of work to do. He asked me three questions: ‘Can you draw? Can you do a grading plan? Can you start tomorrow?’ I answered in the affirmative and that’s how my career began,” he recalls with a laugh. Many of the Chicago-area Nugent projects involved Wadsworth. “At the time I got to know the company I was a draftsman and doing rudimentary grading plans that Dick would review and fix. Mostly I was sitting behind a drafting board every day. Every time I got to go out in the field and there were bulldozers pushing dirt and backhoes digging ditches and cool things going on, I would think, “This is what I want to do.” So, the time came, and Dick was making some staffing changes, so I went to work for Wadsworth.” In the quarter-century since, Karnick has been a leader within Wadsworth, the GCBAA and the industry. His term as president of the GCBAA has been a busy one. As he finishes his time at the helm, we talked with him about what he’s learned, how things have evolved
and what his hopes are for the future. PJ: What was it like at Wadsworth during the go-go days when you signed on? PK: When I joined the team in ’90, Wadsworth was building 20-25 new courses per year. We worked everywhere: southwest, southeast, midwest and Hawaii. It was crazy. I had only worked in the office for about three months when they came to me and said hey do you want to move to Hawaii? You think about that time and compare it today. Wow! PJ: Who are the people who’ve really influenced you along the way? PK: Personally, my parents were a huge influence… setting me on the right course. Put your nose down and work hard and you’ll get where you want to go. From a professional standpoint it was certainly John Cotter and Brent Wadsworth. John was really running the company most of the time I’ve been here. He was really managing all the offices and running the projects from our headquarters in Chicago. He hired me and was the one who sent me to Hawaii to work out of our Pacific office with Tom Shapland. Day or night, I could call him and ask him what to do in almost any circumstance. He was my go-to guy. He was a big influence on myself and of dozens of others GCBAA Earth Shaping News | 3rd Quarter 2019 7