Out in Menlo Park, California, veteran superintendent Josh Lewis at Sharon Heights Golf and Country Club relies upon a network he’s been cultivating for years to find qualified assistants. Besides posting on websites he “beats the bushes,” as he calls it, working a coterie of championship-tier courses like The Olympic Club and Pebble Beach, and asking the superintendents there about promising interns. It helps that volunteers from a wide range of clubs also circulate through venues like that during major tournaments. Lewis’ preference is to find someone with aptitude and interest who might still be new to taking on responsibility – someone who wants to continue learning and advancing their skill set. “I like to find them green and moldable,” he said.

It helps that Sharon Heights is committed to promoting staff development. “The club has a member-supported scholarship program for all employees,” said Lewis. On the turf side that might include making it possible for an intern or assistant in training (AIT) to get a two-year or four-year degree, either through attending classes in person or online.

David Swift, superintendent at Minnehaha Country Club in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is among the industry veterans who has had to scramble to find good help. With the four-year turfgrass program at South Dakota State University in Brookings, 55 miles to the north, having shut down in the last decade, Swift now recruits students from Southeast Technical College in town, which offers eight-week and two-year vocational turfgrass programs.

“Not too many graduates of Penn State or Rutgers are coming out here to start as assistants,” said Swift. So, he draws laborers from the local market, many of them as interns who are getting their technical training at Southeast Tech. “We work them,” he said, “and at $15 per hour they are not going to get rich, but they are learning. It’s a good, healthy job and some of them catch the bug and want to move up. That’s when they can begin focusing on specific skills and move up into the ranks of AITs.”

Today’s need for on-the-job training of potential assistants differs markedly from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when aspiring assistants were usually recruited fresh out of a four-year turfgrass program. Back then, turf schools with two- or four-year programs were well stocked and clubs had their pick. But enrollments started to dwindle and the result is that now, a decade later, the shelves are bare of highly educated candidates for assistant superintendent positions.

“There was a steady decline in enrollments since the end of the golf boom, in about 2005,” reports Dr. Trey Rogers, professor of turfgrass management at Michigan State University, a national powerhouse in the field. The program he manages had 200 students enrolled in 2000. Last year there were 44, but this year the numbers are up to 64.

At Pennsylvania State University, another leader in turfgrass education, professor of turfgrass science Dr. John Kaminski reports a similar picture. “In the late 1990s we had about 250 students in the four-year program,” he said. “Now it’s about 80, but the good news is we’re seeing a rebound in enrollments in both the four-year and the two-year program.”

Turf school registration is tied to the economy at large and to the golf industry as a whole, though these effects can have a time lag that’s hard to pin down. The enrollment boom seems to have been a response to the 1990s golf boom, when superintendent careers seemed attractive and jobs were plentiful. But as the number of golf courses began contracting and veteran superintendents held on to their jobs through the Great Recession, there was a stifling of upward mobility among the ranks of the assistants and less desire for turf programs.

Maintenance team members at the hourly and intern levels who might have considered a career in the turfgrass maintenance business heard discouraging words, not encouragement, from in-house assistants who were unable to move on. Their frustration with career stagnation may have unintentionally driven people who might have succeeded them into other industries that seemed to offer more opportunity.

The loss of caddie programs that brought teens into the game also eliminated a traditional entry portal for those who might have considered a career in golf course maintenance. Equally stifling, but difficult to measure, was a generational shift in attitudes toward work. Beyond a love of golf, perhaps the most important attribute for someone considering a career in course maintenance is a willingness – or at least the ability – to show up for work at 5 a.m., including weekends.

The industry ethos a generation ago was dictated by a hard-nosed approach to the job, one which valued long hours on site and total emotional commitment. Golf industry labor consultant Tyler Bloom believes this attitude contributed to many leaving the profession, combined with the lack of growth potential compared to other industries.

Bloom, who heads his own eponymous consulting firm out of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, holds a four-year turf degree from Penn State and has enough experience as a former superintendent to have credibility as an industry insider intent on helping his colleagues recruit and train more efficiently and with longer-lasting results. Chief among his strategies is emphasizing workforce development systems that recruit from within existing communities, structured on-the-job training and a “people first” culture.

In consulting with clubs and through presentations to trade associations, Bloom emphasizes what he calls a “build-from-within approach.” That means developing an in-house apprenticeship program that focuses on mastering specific skills and developing the leadership an employer needs versus general entry-level work experience. It is a strategy he recommends for every level of a club’s operation – not just course maintenance but food and beverage as well. However, this strategy is especially well suited to developing a pipeline of assistant superintendents because the job entails a combination of technical expertise, unusual hours and physical labor.

He also recommends adjusting the workplace culture to one that is more accommodating to people’s diverse needs, with work/life balance a crucial element in the next generation’s understanding of what makes for a sensible career.

Cultivating talent from within is central to the operation that superintendent Chris Tritabaugh runs at Hazeltine National Golf Club in the Minneapolis suburb of Chaska. His recruitment approach includes the opportunity to move up the ladder, from intern positions to AITs, technicians, and one of three assistant posts. He has also explored tying in the seasonal nature of work at Hazeltine with an equally prestigious club or two in the South whose seasonal calendar runs opposite to his. “Hire the person, then train them,” he said. “It also helps to be able to provide them with seasonal housing as well as educational opportunities,” said Tritabaugh.

Across the industry, the emphasis upon recruiting and developing assistants involves growing the labor pool and drawing more interested people into the industry. At the introductory level, a program like the Golf Course Superintendents Association’s First Green can open up students’ eyes to the golf course as an interesting place and to golf course maintenance as a rewarding career. Tritabaugh also credits Toro’s in-house Assistants Experience and similar industry events and programming that helps promising candidates appreciate the full range of skills needed beyond one’s formal education.

One thing is for sure – the less an assistant’s post is seen as an arduous, make-or-break test and the more it is embraced as a moment in the unfolding of one’s engagement with life, nature and people, the more it will attract talented young men and women. Pay is an issue – it always is – but so is the head superintendent’s willingness to flex on everything from hours and days off to who they hire and what their work background is. Golf needs assistant superintendents – both for their contributions today and for their role as the superintendents of tomorrow. Finding ways to make their job worth training for and doing is a critical challenge facing the game today.

Brad Klein is a veteran freelance journalist whose biography, "Discovering Donald Ross," won  the Herbert Warren Wind Book Award for 2001.