4 minute read
Korn Ferry Suits Volunteers to a Tee
By Linda Thorsen Bond for TPC Colorado
In the shadow of professional golfers at the Korn Ferry Tour in Berthoud, more than 700 volunteers are practically invisible. But the tournament could not go on without them.
There will be volunteer drivers and walking scorers, standard bearers and player services. In fact, there are 16 different volunteer committees headed by volunteers. Neither the chairs nor the workers get paid, but the jobs are so desirable that the volunteer positions were filled in April for the July event.
The beautiful course outside of Berthoud is indeed worthy of the Korn Ferry Tour. This year’s $600,000 TPC Colorado Championship is set for July 8-11, with pre-tournament activities planned for July 5-7. It’s the developmental tour for the U.S. -based PGA TOUR and features professional golfers who have either not yet reached the PGA TOUR, or who have done so but then failed to win enough FedEx Cup points to stay at that level. Those who are on the top 25 of the money list at year’s end are given PGA TOUR memberships for the next season. Since the 2013 season, the Korn Ferry Tour has been the primary pathway for those seeking to earn their PGA TOUR card. At the end of the combined 2020 and 2021 Korn Ferry Tour season, the top 25 performers in the regular season will earn PGA Tour cards, with 25 more up for grabs during the 2021 Finals. Three people working on Berthoud’s Korn Ferry Tour talked about what keeps them coming back year after year to head up volunteer committees. Doug Elsesser and Stefanie Vasquez are what you might call a power couple in the world of volunteers. Together they are chairs of three national tournaments for walking scorers, scoring control and standard bearers, organizing hundreds of volunteers every year and helping with three or four more other tournaments. They are retired military and learned mandatory service in the Navy. “We love doing this. It’s an expensive hobby, but we have a passion for it, ” Elsesser said.
The Berthoud tournament is one of the most popular among the workers, according to Elsesser. “The number of volunteers for this tournament far exceeds any other event because so many people want to work on it, ” he said.
Vasquez said volunteering as a walking scorer is an addictive position. It’s a very important job and considered the hardest committee to get into. The 75 walking scorers for each tournament literally walk around with the golfers, keep track of all scores and provide the statistics to the PGA website and media platforms on a smartphone-type device. She said these volunteers walk the entire golf course, recording every stroke, every surface, every penalty.
Why would anyone want that pressure? Elsesser said walking scorers are the only people to completely go from tee box to green with the golfers, hear the golfers talk with their caddies, listen to why they pick this club over that—and even see and hear their meltdowns! The scorers have respectful relationships with the golfers, even though they are warned not to talk to the players unless they are first talked to. Usually at the end of the round the players thank the volunteers and give them signed golf balls.
Vasquez started following Elsesser at tournaments, then literally followed him into the volunteer field. She has had two heart attacks, one at age 43 and one at 46. And still she can’t stop training volunteers, both in person and on YouTube video. Elsesser said, “New people contact us to see how we run things. We share our best practices; there is no proprietary info, just the best of things we’ ve learned in 20 years of working on tournaments. ”
Chris Parkes runs the transportation and operations committees for this Korn Ferry Tour. He said the TPC Colorado course is “a long, beautiful course with so much variety that it forces the golfers to use a lot of the clubs in their bag. The players who came here before were completely blown away by the amount of fans. We have 700 plus volunteers and we even had to turn some away. ”
Parkes believes this tournament is so successful in recruiting volunteers for three reasons. He said, “One: people in the community really care about northern Colorado. Two: people are looking for things to do and they believe that being outside is safer than being inside. ”
The third reason is the most significant. “There is such a margin of error. The ball can bounce the right way versus the wrong way, ” Parkes said. “You can see the next generation of golf stars right here. The great players, Justin Thomas, Cameron Champ, David Duval, Bubba Watson, Jason Day and more, have played in Korn Ferry Tours. At the 2020 event we saw Will Zalatoris win his professional golf event with a score of 15 under. He went on to finish in the top ten in the last three majors. If he hadn’t won this event, he wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity and it changed his life. When you ’re volunteering, you get to meet these young men up close and personal and follow them into their careers. ”
