GCSAA’s Board of Directors is always eager to gather feedback from GCSAA members. One of the ways they do this is through board outreach visits. Each year, the five directors — not including the officers — visit a field staff region outside of that board member’s home base, in an effort to gather more information from members, network across a broader area, and learn about challenges that may not affect the region in which that board member resides. This year, I was happy to host T.A. Barker, CGCS, in the Mid-Atlantic region.

T.A. is a second-year director of GCSAA, and the superintendent at Fore Lakes Golf Course in Taylorsville, Utah, where he has worked since 1995 and served as superintendent since 2006. Over the course of three days, we were able to visit six golf courses, attend the annual meeting of Pocono GCSA, and visit professors and graduate students at Penn State to learn about current research initiatives and some of the successes and challenges associated with the multiple turf programs (certificate, B.S., world-campus) offered by the university.

Keeping up with the needs of a rapidly changing market is a top priority for GCSAA, and through these outreach visits the board can mine for and receive a lot of good information from a range of people within the industry. The GCSAA Board of Directors “steers the ship” on key initiatives with which GCSAA engages. But even before many of these initiatives make it to the board room, they are developed and vetted by committees made up of GCSAA members. If you’d like to get involved in volunteering to serve on a GCSAA committee, please reach out to me.

Please see photographs below of T.A.’s visit.