The golf and turf industries are bracing to get a fresh look at the 2022 U.S. Women’s Open and the corps of female volunteers who supported the event.
“Breaking the Turfgrass Ceiling” will make its debut on YouTube on Feb. 7 to coincide with the GCSAA Conference & Trade Show. Subsequent episodes in the 14-episode series will drop each Friday, beginning Feb. 10.
Dr. Sheila Schroeder, a professor in the film department at the University of Denver, is the executive producer of the series and will be attending the show. She will be distributing postcards in Orlando with QR codes to make for easy access to the series for show attendees.
A recreational golfer, Schroder was enthused about sharing the stories of the women in turf who were on hand at Pine Needles last June for the U.S. Women’s Open.
“That is what appealed to me, because I’m very much about female empowerment, about equity, about inclusion,” she says. “That’s my own mission as a filmmaker.”
Schroeder learned about Women in Turf after attending a KPMG Women’s Golf Clinic in 2021. She met golf course architect Kari Haug, who was part of volunteer team supporting the 2021 U.S. Women’s Open at The Olympic Club. Haug, in turn, spoke with Kimberly Gard from Syngenta and Shelia Finney from the GCSAA who were putting together a team of volunteers to support the 2022 U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles. The pair invited Schroeder to make the trip, and Schroeder and her assistant Leif Soederberg were on site at Pine Needles.
“We filmed primarily with our phones,” Schroeder says. “We did that primarily so we could have the immediacy of shooting something, editing really quickly and putting it up (on Twitter and other social media) so the content was not real time, but very close to real time and tell the stories of a really incredible group of women.”
Once they returned to Denver and began archiving their video, Schroeder, Soederberg and a team of interns realized the treasure trove of material they had and that there was too much of it to set aside. The idea for a series celebrating women in turf was then developed.
“I would say we have 14 solid episodes, which to me is a little bit mind-blowing considering that we thought we could probably pull five or six together,” Schroeder says.
The inaugural episode was recorded at the Olympic Club, where Schroeder spoke with director of golf maintenance Troy Flanagan, green committee chair Marissa Mar and 2021 U.S. Women’s Open volunteer Noel Popoli. The first episode is the longest in the series, approximately 12 minutes, and sets the stage for those that follow, most of which are in the three- to six-minute range.
“(The opening episode) covers a lot of territory,” Schroeder says. “It covers the ‘why’ something like the Women in Turf team is necessary.”
The female volunteers were welcomed from the moment they arrived at Pine Needles to support David Fruchte and his team. They were certainly needed. In the weeks leading up to the championship, the crew maintaining the Pine Needles course numbered just 11. But most of all, what the women brought was their enthusiasm. Schroeder recalls the comments of one member of the Pine Needles staff.
“He said, ‘The women bring a different energy to the course every day. They walk in, they’re laughing, they’re excited to be there, they’re excited to be with each other,’” Schroeder says. “He said that rubs off on all the men, ‘because sometimes we just wander in and jump on the tractor or the mower or whatever and we’re off doing our thing but they made it a much more exciting and social event.’”
And the women were energized by working alongside other women sharing their stories, and how they coped with the challenges they faced as women in a male-dominated industry.
“When you talk to these women about their experiences, they’re talking about their experiences at their home clubs,” Schroeder says. “They’re talking about what it’s like to raise small children and be in the industry. You’re talking about what it means to be the only female mechanic in the golf industry and then they discover that there’s one more standing next to them at Pine Needles.
“So, it’s moments like that that while we were at Pine Needles, some of the discussion that we had were about women in the turf industry in general.”
Rick Woelfel is a Philadelphia-based writer, host of the Wonderful Women of Golf podcast and senior Golf Course Industry contributor.
This news is republished from another source. You can check the original article here