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President's message |
Meeting our Class A goal
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Last month marked the deadline for the latest group of grandfathered GCSAA Class A members to complete requirements for continuation of their Class A status under the Professional Development Initiative.
Although July 1 was the deadline for attaining the necessary points to keep Class A standing, members did not have to post all their education and service points with the association by that date, so full renewal numbers are incomplete as I write this.
However, it’s gratifying to report that more than 57 percent of Class A members assigned to the initial four-year renewal cycle completed all their requirements in time, surpassing our goal of 53 percent. This compares with 61 percent of Class A’s who completed their requirements last year in the initial three-year cycle, and expectations are that we’ll finish at around this number again this year.
In case you’re wondering about raw numbers, these percentages mean that 981 Class A members of the 1,711 in this year’s cycle completed all requirements for maintaining their Class A status.
As you’ll recall, members were grandfathered into PDI implementation and were placed on a three-, four- or five-year renewal cycle. July 1 was the renewal deadline for those on the four-year cycle, and the final grandfathered group’s deadline is set for July 2008.
It’s important to note that we don’t expect next year’s final grandfathered group to reach the 60-percent-plus mark simply because the last group intentionally includes many GCSAA members who are expected to move to Retired status before their renewal deadline.
These renewal numbers, of course, are vitally important to our current positioning and media campaign for Class A members, which, as I told GCM for an article last month, is the culmination of the vision of GCSAA’s past leadership for member standards (see “Keeping a promise,” Page 68 of the July issue).
GCSAA’s high level of member standards is now going to be shared with the golf world, and I, along with all of the association’s leadership, believe that respect and value for the profession will grow appropriately as we create brand equity and awareness of GCSAA Class A members and of the association itself.
We’ve already had significant success in making employers aware of what GCSAA membership means and the benefits of employing a GCSAA Class A member, with evidence of this in GCSAA’s 2007 Compensation, Benefits and Operations Report.
This fresh-off-the-press document reveals that while the average base salary for GCSAA superintendents is $73,766, Superintendent Members at a public facility (with five to nine years of experience) earn an average of $54,329, while the average salary for a public-facility Class A member with the same experience is $61,366.
Despite rising maintenance costs and a flat golf economy, the survey shows that GCSAA members over the last two years have slightly outdone average national salary increases. Also keep in mind that the average superintendent salary in 1993 was $44,500.
So while there’s still work to be done, these no-nonsense benchmarks demonstrate how far we’ve come. I congratulate members who have fulfilled the PDI educational requirement and thank all members who have participated in these important surveys of our membership.
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