Creating Career-Altering Opportunities
The idea that Section involvement is a civic duty, something you do because you should, sells the opportunity short. There’s also a strong case for self-interest and career advancement. PGA of America Golf Professionals who become active at the Section level may advance faster in their own careers than those who don’t. The reasons are not mysterious. Section work puts a member in regular contact with general managers, owners, vendors, other golf professionals, PGA of America staff and the people who make hiring decisions in the market. It creates a track record that shows up on a resume and builds the kinds of references that matter when an attractive job opens up across town.
For example, Wells likes to tell Gateway PGA Members that Section tournaments are much more than a way to let competitive juices flow.
“We have members all the time say they love playing with new people in tournaments,” she says. “It’s like a four-hour interview. You never know who your next employer might be. You never know what kind of impression you might make.”
Abbot makes an even stronger claim about the networking that’s possible through PGA Section activities.
“There’s the power of the PGA network,” Abbot says. “I don’t think there’s a better network out there in the business world. It’s amazing how connected one professional is to the next. I’m always impressed with how open they are with how they operate – their trade secrets, so to speak.”
PGA of America Golf Professionals who are active in their Sections often find multiple angles to the networking opportunities available to them:
Leadership development – Running a committee is, essentially, running a small business unit. A PGA of America Member who has managed a tournament committee has run budgets, managed volunteers, handled sponsors, dealt with complaints and delivered a product on a deadline. Those are the skills nearly any employer is looking for, especially in executive management roles like General Manager and Director of Golf positions.
Network density – A PGA of America Member active in a Section meets hundreds of peers over a career. Those relationships aren’t just LinkedIn contacts but as people they have actually worked or played golf with. That network shows up in job leads, mentorship relationships, vendor recommendations and the informal information flow that drives any industry. Charnes says it shaped his career and continues to shape his work even now.
“As you get to know other golf professionals, you can take ideas back to your facility – big ideas, small ideas,” the PGA of America Vice President says. “You can learn from each other and take that back and use it to improve your club, improve your programs, improve your training.”
Mentorship – The Section level is where younger PGA of America Golf Professionals find mentors and where veteran PGA Members find ways to give back. Both sides benefit. Conversations in the parking lot after a Monday tournament or during a committee meeting can have an immediate and lasting impact that can’t be replaced.
Business acumen – Sections increasingly offer professional development sessions for their members on employment contracts, merchandising, coaching revenue and facility operations. The PGA of America’s Career Consultants, reachable through the Sections, can walk a member through contract negotiations or a job transition with a level of industry-specific knowledge that people in other industries can’t match.
“You can’t be a PGA of America Golf Professional unless you’re employed in the golf business,” Abbot says. “The Sections and the Career Consultants are here for you, so make sure they assist you in getting where you want to be. Lean on your Section staff to hopefully sharpen your skills and help take you to the next level.”
Continuing education – Section-level seminars, certification programs and PGA of America coursework all flow through, or adjacent to, the Section infrastructure. A member who treats the Section as a professional development platform will find it delivers one.
Getting Started is Crucial
As with so many things in life, the most difficult part of making the most of your PGA Section is getting started. The good thing is how easy it is to do just that, thanks to the multiple ways PGA of America Members can get involved at the Section level.
Joining a committee at the Section or Chapter level is the most common starting point. Every Section runs a portfolio of standing committees, and most of them are looking for members, such as Tournaments, Awards, Employment, Education, Assistants and Associates, Finance and Junior Golf. These all combine high-impact work with visible results.
Another attainable entry point is volunteering for Section events. From Section championships, to pro-ams, charity outings and PGA HOPE events all run on volunteer power. Members who show up once tend to get asked back and earn more responsibility and visibility over time.
And, of course, running for Section office is an excellent way to get deeply involved. This is the long path, and the one that leads, often, from Section Board through District representation and, in some cases, to the PGA of America’s national officer ranks. Members who want to shape policy, direct resources and represent peers should put their names forward.
The advice from Section leaders is consistent: pick one and get started. The members who wait for the perfect opportunity may miss many others along the way.
“Reach out to one of your Section officers, a fellow member, or reach out to a Section staff member and share with them where your passions are,” Abbot says. “Whether it’s just playing in an event, coming out for some education, or stepping up to say, ‘Hey, I’d like to serve in a leadership capacity,’ there’s something for everyone.”
Wells echoes the point. Sections, she says, exist to do exactly this.
“Pick up the phone, give us a call, reach out,” she says. “We’ll be happy to connect you with a member or someone who can talk to you and help direct you down a path that follows your passion.”
Charnes makes a related observation from his own experience: The people whose job it is to serve PGA of America Golf Professionals are eager to do exactly that.
“I haven’t yet met a Section staff member or Executive Director who has turned away a PGA of America Member who wanted to get involved,” he says.
Sections Provide a Boost to Facilities
Getting involved at the PGA Section level is often a career boost for PGA of America Golf Professionals. And, as it turns out, what’s good for individual careers is also good for members’ facilities, as well.
That’s because a PGA Professional who is active in his or her Section brings a variety of impactful benefits to facilities. In terms of hiring staff, for example, PGA of America Head Professionals who are active in their Sections are likely to have access to a deeper bench when an assistant position opens up. That member has likely met the candidates, seen them work events and heard what other PGA Members say about them, which is a great advantage when filling impactful job openings.
Hosting PGA Section events – a qualifier, a Member event, a pro-am, a PGA HOPE clinic – also brings visibility, media coverage and outside revenue to a facility. It also signals to ownership that their PGA of America Golf Professional is plugged into the industry at a level the facility benefits from.
PGA HOPE, PGA Jr. League, Drive, Chip and Putt and other PGA of America programs run through Section infrastructure. A facility that hosts them is, by definition, growing the game and creating future club members, students and customers in the process.
There’s also a wealth of best practices to be learned through being active in PGA Section events, where PGA Professionals learn what is working – or not working – at other facilities. Charnes values this level of networking with his peers.
“I take ideas still to this day back to my club that I pick up as I travel to Section meetings, tournaments and functions all over the country,” he says. “Sometimes you don’t even realize it, but you pick up on things when you watch other people – how they interact and play, how they teach and coach, how they manage their operation.”
PGA of America Golf Professionals also benefit from contacts made through their Section’s sponsor roster, which often opens doors for individual facilities. Vendors who support the Section are more receptive to conversations with member clubs. The relationship is reciprocal, and it is one of the most direct revenue benefits of PGA Section engagement.
A facility whose PGA of America Professionals sits on Section committees, or whose membership supports the Section foundation, also carries a different profile in its community. For facilities courting new members, corporate outings or local sponsors, that profile is an asset.
The thread running through all of it is what Eshleman calls community. A Section, he says, is best understood as a neighborhood.
“Your Section is like your community,” he says. “You take care of your neighborhood where you live. Well, becoming involved in your Section is like being a part of your community – and making sure your community is taken care of.”
SBO Creates a New Path
While PGA of America Members are being asked to invest more in their Sections, the PGA of America is making its own investment in how those Sections operate.
One such vehicle is Section Business Operations (SBO), a centralized function built to support all 41 Sections with shared tools, data and resources. The model borrows the NBA’s Team Marketing and Business Operations group, known as TMBO, which gives the league’s 30 franchises a central hub for best practices, benchmarking and revenue development. The premise translates cleanly to PGA Sections: 41 Sections with local operating environments, with one central team whose job is to make sure insight and infrastructure flow freely between them.
Wellington started studying how each Section related to the national Association when he joined the PGA of America in 2016.
“I quickly discovered we needed a different path forward,” says Wellington, a former Executive Director with the Colorado PGA Section. “We needed to be able to deliver our level of support at a much higher level and scale it across all 41 Sections.”
Wellington reached out to the NBA, and went to New York to meet with TMBO officials. The result was the formation of the SBO and a substantial change in how the PGA national office works with the 41 Sections.
“The NBA is the oldest major sports operation that has a department serving and supporting their teams in a similar way that we serve and support our Sections,” Wellington says. The NFL and Major League Baseball have since built similar functions. None of the models translate directly to golf, but the principle does.
“The data sharing, the best-practice sharing – those kinds of things were critically important early on and still are,” Wellington says. “Is there a great idea happening in Southern California that we can apply to New England? It’s going to be different – maybe take on a different shape and form – but a similar concept.”
O’Donnell, who joined the PGA of America team a little over two years ago and now leads Member Section Operations – the broader department under which SBO sits – describes the more recent reorganization that put SBO on its current footing.
“SBO was stood back up as an independent department,” he says. “For the last two-plus years, SBO is fully established in its role as the liaison between headquarters and all 41 Sections.”
The result, in O’Donnell’s accounting: Executive Director satisfaction with the support function has risen meaningfully, with the Net Promoter Score from the 41 EDs climbing to 8.1, up from 7.9 the year before. Wellington is proud of the trend and quick to say it isn’t where the team wants to land.
“We’re very proud of it, and hopefully we can get it to a perfect score at some point,” he says. “I’m very proud of the work the team does.”
In 2025, that work included SBO-produced customized reports for each of the 41 PGA of America Sections, combining financial metrics with Section-specific member survey responses. Sections were grouped in cohort groups – by membership size, for example – so leaders could see how their Section performed against true peers rather than against a national average that might mask regional realities.
“The great thing about it is when you get in front of volunteer leaders and they’re looking at numbers, the numbers don’t lie,” Wellington says. “Whether it’s good or whether it shows some weakness and opportunities to get better, and it did that in all cases, it helps form strategies for leadership moving forward.”
Updated editions of the reports are in production now and will roll out to Sections within weeks.
The SBO is also working on an Association-wide push to update and standardize facility data across all 41 Sections, tied to a tier of Section Strategic Funding. The premise: Aggregate the data, make it accessible in real time, and push it back out so Sections can make better business decisions.
“For years we were working off many different platforms internally, different software, different systems,” Wellington says. “We’re finally getting to a point where we’re trying to pull all of that into one thing.”
SBO is also working on pilot programs for Section asset valuation and sponsor prospecting. Four Sections – North Florida, South Florida, Georgia and Carolinas – served as test markets in 2024 for a deeper look at sponsorship asset value and prospect identification, in partnership with Nielsen Sports and SponsorUnited. The Carolinas PGA Section took the most aggressive advantage of the work. The pilot has since expanded to 15 Sections, and Wellington expects it to lead to a sustained resource for Sections trying to build new revenue streams.
“When we ask the Sections, ‘What’s the one thing the PGA of America and SBO can help you with?’, it’s always identifying new revenue streams,” Wellington says. “Everybody’s challenged by that. With rising costs and, in some cases, flat or declining revenue, trying to find money is a constant battle.”
Resource and professional development are also key benefits from the SBO. Twice-monthly updates to the SBO Portal are intended to keep Section staffs current on available tools and materials. Wellington considers the SBO portal as the central place where every resource, template and best practice document lives, with an aggregated newsletter going out to Section staff every two weeks. A calendar of seminars for Executive Directors and their staffs, run in conjunction with the ED Committee, includes a flagship SBO Conference each January.
The peer-to-peer working groups that Wells values most for the Gateway PGA Section are an extension of all of this SBO activity. Tournament, player development and foundation directors across Sections now connect more frequently than they did even three years ago.
“It’s getting very specific. It’s best practicing, it’s connecting resources, partners: How do we im prove this program? What are you doing that works there?” Wells says. “Whether it’s a survey that gets sent around to all Sections to say, ‘How do you do this?’ or a quick phone call that says, ‘Hey, I’m struggling with this’ – the group of 41 Sections, even though we comprise the entire country, we operate fairly closely. Our businesses are similar in many respects. We do the same general thing, but we carry it out in 41 very unique and different ways.”
The 2026 SBO agenda extends these goals. The SBO Conference is being reimagined to put more weight on peer networking and best practice sharing. Strategic Funding will add a new tier tied to Member Career Profile completion – a push to get more PGA of America Members actively maintaining their professional profiles, which in turn feeds the data that drives the whole system. Section Operational Reviews will give each Section a structured look at its own performance against peers.
The underlying logic, which both Wellington and O’Donnell come back to, is straightforward. Strong Sections make strong PGA of America Members. Strong members make a strong Association. SBO is the PGA of America’s bet that systematic support for Section operations compounds over time.
“It’s critically important that the Sections represent their demographic,” O’Donnell says. “There are regionalized and local nuances to all 41. That’s why they exist, and how our constitution, bylaws and governance have led us to where we are. Having the field team living and working and supporting in those territories is critical, because they know and understand that membership better than anybody.”
An Invitation to Get Involved
None of the SBO model or the very system of PGA Sections, however, works without PGA Members who choose to get involved.
The outline of what a Section offers – governance experience, committee work, a network of peers, foundation volunteer opportunities, event experience, programming infrastructure, professional development – is, on paper, a development program most industries would envy. It is also, for PGA of America Golf Professionals, an existing part of their memberships. It runs well, and it runs on participants.
The PGA of America Members who take part in Section activities will tell you it changed their careers through the mentors they met at events, the jobs they found through Section contacts, the committees they chaired that taught them how to run a facility, and the foundation events that gave them purpose beyond their own facilities.
Charnes is one of those PGA Members. So is Eshleman. So is every officer who has come through the chairs in recent memory. Each of them traces their arc back to a PGA Section that asked them to help with something.
“If you give to your Section, you will get it back 100 times over in areas that you never thought of,” Eshleman says.
