The PGA Education Center is less than a five minute walk away from the Hilton Garden Inn where we’re staying. When you arrive for the 8:30a Seminar, you’ll sign-in, grab your name tag, and then find your assigned seat in Ballroom A. They’re in alphabetical order: A’s in the front, Z’s in the back.
Day 1 hit like a ton of bricks. Following a short introduction by PGA Senior Manager of Education Helene Bell, who jokingly referred to herself as “the principal of this school,” it was time to address the topic at hand: Business Planning.
I hate to break it to you, but it was anything but exciting. The Seminar was led by PGA Education faculty member Michelle Hupfer (PGA), who played college golf at Northern Illinois University, and adjunct faculty member Doug Vilven (PGA), who owned and operated a driving range in Salt Lake City called Golf In the Round for several years.
There are five phases to the PGA Business Planning Model: defining the business, assessing the current state of the business, developing business objectives and supporting strategies, preparing financial forecasts and budgets, and monitoring performance. But I won’t bore you (or me again for that matter) with the particulars. All I can say is that Thursday and Friday can’t come soon enough. That’s when we have Introduction to Teaching.
About 90 minutes into the day’s session, you’ll finally get online access to the Level 1 Work Experience Portfolio. This is where you have to choose between two different golf courses and analyze the case studies accordingly using the Business Planning Model. Pine Valley Country Club is an 18-hole private course and Saguaro (pronounced suh-WAR-oh not SAG-war-oh or Squirrel) Sands Golf Links, an 18-hole daily fee facility. Choose your course wisely because you’re stuck with it, and they divide the room into those two groups accordingly!
There are a total of eight activities in the portfolio, and with a little hard work, you should have no trouble completing the first three by the end of day one. Then your progress will come to a screeching halt. There’s a reason why it takes more than 24 months (on average) to complete Level 1. You should attempt to save your work as often as possible. But user beware: you may not always be able to save your work! The internet access in the classrooms is spotty, so try to save early and often.
Several of us learned that lesson the hard way when we attempted to save our activities and had our screens come back blank. Apparently, they’ve had this problem before when too many people are trying to use the PGA Wi-Fi network at the same time.
Download the Business Planning Manual in advance and bring your laptop so you can take notes directly onto the Word doc during the lectures. Then you can print them out later if you want. They provide copies of the manuals at the Education Center, but they’re in black and white and they’re not very clear.
The only thing you might want to read, print out beforehand, and bring with you is the Case Studies. That way when you’re working on your Work Experience Portfolio, you won’t have to flip back and forth. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with a three-ring binder full of paper that you’re not using all week (like me). You can also print them out at the PGA Education Center when you get there.
I would summarize the day as basically an eight-hour lecture with breaks and a buffet lunch back at the hotel in between. Every day there’s something different on the menu. Today it was pulled pork, barbecue chicken, baked beans, potato salad, and salad.
The student lounge in the Education Center is stocked with tea, soda, water, Gatorade, and coffee. Feel free to help yourself! There’s also a plaque containing the neatly-engraved name plates of every PGA Master Professional dating back to 1972.
On one of your ten-minute breaks, be sure to check out the memorabilia displays of past PGA Champions hanging on the walls inside all the classrooms. The PGA Museum of Golf on property may be closed for renovations right now, but this isn’t a bad consolation: there are pictures of just about every winner alongside a description of the tournament he won and a club he used that week or an article of clothing (shirts, belts, hats, and even shoes) he wore on his way to the winner’s circle. One of my favorite items is the wedge Phil Mickelson used to get up and down for par when he won the PGA Championship at Baltusrol back in 2005.
Oil portraits of several of the game’s greatest players painted by J. Anthony Wills in 1974 and 1975 proudly stand sentry along the entire length of one of the ballroom walls: Gene Sarazen, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, and Jack Nicklaus. They’re so good, so true to form, and so lifelike that by the end of the day, you’ll swear that they’re going to get up and walk right out of their antique wooden frames.
Oh, and by the way, the dress code may be suit and tie (business attire), but I guarantee that once you get to the Education Center, your coat will come off and it’ll hang off the back of your chair until the end of the day when you’re ready to put it back on and walk back down the street to the hotel.
To put a bow on our first day, around 5:15p the PGA hosted a one-hour social gathering back at the hotel. It was pouring rain outside, but the beer was ice cold inside. I thought it was a touch of class. The conversation was pretty good too. I finally got a chance to talk to several of the other attendees I hadn’t had a chance to interact with throughout the day.
Shortly after that, a few of us hoppped on board the Palm Beach Tours courtesy shuttle and grabbed some dinner to-go at a nearby Chipotle. We didn’t stay and eat. We wanted to get back and get to work on our Work Experience Portfolios!
Preview of Day 2: Customer Relations Seminar (8:30a-4:15p)
Not really sure what to expect tomorrow. Doug is back, and for this session, he’ll be joined by Erik Nielsen (PGA). There’s also an optional Business Planning Review from 8:05a-8:30a that several of us are going to attend so we can get some clarification on our Work Experience Portfolios.
Very well written. I am just now applying for Level 1 and hopefully will be attending Seminars in my near future. This helped out a ton. Appreciate you taking the time to give us this insight. Looking forward to your experience of Day 2. Thanks a lot.
Well-written and perfectly accurate. Can’t wait for Day 2 to see what other memories we soon will be making.