COVER STORY
TAKING OWNERSHIP
As Linfield National’s Owner, Kleckner Constantly Trying To Make Improvements By Tom McNichol, Contributing Writer
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t’s been 20 years since Robert Kleckner came on board as the head pro at Linfield National Golf Club, a relative newcomer to the golf scene in western Montgomery County at the time. But in those 20 years, Linfield National has changed from a golf course where Kleckner works to a golf course he owns. That’s right, Kleckner is fully invested in Linfield National in every possible way. Kleckner took over as the owner in 2012 and by 2016 he had garnered enough notice for the job he’s doing at Linfield National that the Philadelphia Section PGA named him its Golf Professional of the Year. The Philadelphia Section gives out a lot of awards for performance on the golf course, but Golf Professional of the Year is the highest award it hands out for performance off the golf course, in taking care of the business of promoting the game, for making it better. “This game has given me so much, my family, my place of business, it’s all part of it,” Kleckner said on a rare slow August Monday when Linfield National’s greens are being aerated, one of two aerations the course undergoes each year. “All of us who work in
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tri-state golfer | Fall 2021
golf owe the game so much.” Kleckner has emerged as a leader among his fellow golf professionals and his fellow owners and operators of public courses in the region. When the state of Pennsylvania shut down golf courses when the coronavirus first appeared on the scene in March of 2020, it was the president of the Pennsylvania Golf Course Owners Association that club pros and public course owners called for answers. That would be Robert Kleckner. “We shut down March 15 and on March 16 we were figuring out what our next move was,” Kleckner said. With advocates like Kleckner working hard, golf courses opened for play again by May 1. The story had a happy ending with golf becoming one of the few recreational activities that could be pursued safely in the midst of the pandemic. The game exploded at every level in 2020, a boom that has carried over into 2021. Kleckner, though, never thought the game was dying before that. He has that much faith that the game will always be strong enough to survive. “I thought there were signs before the pandemic in January and February of 2020
Robert Kleckner
that things were picking up,” Kleckner said. The one thing that never really did come back was indoor simulators, an aspect of the game that has grown exponentially as the technology has continued to improve in the last decade. Kleckner was typically ahead of the curve in raising Linfield National’s game in the area of simulators. He was, however, leasing space to other simulator operators at Linfield National. Not anymore. Linfield National and Kleckner now own the simulator operation and Kleckner’s simulators have the
