{{ubiquityData.prevArticle.description}}
{{ubiquityData.nextArticle.description}}
Rick Woulfe has a long list of memories in the game, but one of his fondest is how Jim Demick found his way to the Florida State Golf Association.
Woulfe, a 12-time FSGA Player of the Year who is about to be inducted into the association’s Hall of Fame, was part of a small search committee in 1996 to decide who would replace Cal Korf, the executive director who had just announced his retirement.
“It was a very interesting couple of weeks in meeting a lot of different people and talking with them about what they believed they could do and why they would be the best person to be elected,” Woulfe recalled. “And when we met Jim, we just thought, ‘You know, this guy is from Florida, he had just sold his business and obviously wasn’t looking to make a killing in doing the job and he was a little bit younger than some of the other candidates.’ So we made the decision and boy … we may have stumbled into it, who knows why, but from the get-go it was clear that Jim was going to make a big difference.
“He took a very good association and he made the best in the country. And there isn’t really anybody who would challenge that.”
Throughout Demick’s 24 years leading the FSGA until his retirement last month, the organization has reached new heights in every conceivable category. When he started the job, the association operated out of a small 18-hole course in Sarasota with less than a handful of employees and spent the bulk of its energy conducting elite men’s golf tournaments. More than two decades later, the FSGA owns a headquarters in Tampa with more than 20 employees, has cultivated an expansive army of 500-plus volunteers and conducts more than 600 days of competition each year for players of all ages and playing abilities, male and female. Even during the doldrums of the pandemic, Demick’s team worked tirelessly to put on more than 450 days of competition in the past year, a microcosm of how dynamic and robust the FSGA has become.
The formation of the Florida Junior Tour – an affordable circuit Demick’s team started in 2003 at a time when many junior golf organizations were invading the state and charging astronomical prices – became a culture-changer at the FSGA and led to the creation of more championships and more varied opportunities across all facets of competition. Included in that was the FSGA merging with the struggling Florida Women’s State Golf Association, allowing for a dramatic expansion – the amount of women’s tournaments across the state doubled and the Florida Junior Tour began to send talented junior girls into higher levels of both amateur and professional golf.
“We decided that our players and our clubs are our customers, we’re here to help them in what they are trying to accomplish."
Jim Demick
Behind that identity, the FSGA grew into the largest and most active golf association across the country.
“Many golf associations act as if they are governing bodies and that means they’re in charge of how everything is run, but we decided to take a different approach,” Demick said. “We decided that our players and our clubs are our customers, we’re here to help them in what they are trying to accomplish. Through that, we just grew every year, adding more and more programs to be able to offer things to all clubs and all golfers.
“We embraced that all golfers are pretty neat people and they all deserve a chance to compete regardless of their skill level and experience. If you go to one of our tournaments, you will see every type of person imaginable. Every income level, every background you can think of is represented.”
But Demick’s tenure at the FSGA did not stop at on-course competition. The organization conducts more than 50 educational seminars each year on everything from the Rules of Golf to volunteer training to understanding the World Handicap System. Of particular pride to Demick is the Future of Golf Foundation, which awarded $60,000 of college scholarships in 2019-20 and continues to raise money so the tournament schedule can expand while keeping prices reasonable. Fittingly, the FSGA has recently announced the creation of the Jim Demick Scholarship, which will be given to one high school senior each year for outstanding display of academic achievement, sportsmanship and community service. It will be worth $10,000 a year, renewable for up to four years throughout his or her college career.
As Demick developed an association with many prongs, those around him say his most significant leadership attribute was the ability to hire the right people and let them have a voice so they could be just as much a part of the process. There is no greater indicator of that than his successor, Jeff Magaditsch, who joined the FSGA in 2007 as a 24-year-old tournament director and has been a central part of the organization for 14 years. And of the employees currently on staff, roughly half have been on the team for longer than 10 years.
“He has always been a thoughtful person, listening to everyone’s perspective while still having a direction in mind,” said George Roat, a former longtime FSGA board member. “And he would coalesce all of those perspectives, put them into one direction and get everyone on board. There were very few rough spots, and I attribute all of that to him. He knew how to deal with people.”
The origins of Demick being perfectly suited for the job started when he grew up at Delray Beach Golf Club, playing in his first tournament when he was 6 years old. Before attending the University of Florida, Demick spent time as a caddie, a bag-room assistant and a member of the course maintenance staff, all while playing competitively throughout the state. Despite being an accomplished player, he never turned professional and looked to a career in accounting as a certified public accountant with Price Waterhouse in Atlanta.
The game never left his veins. While in Georgia, Demick joined East Lake Golf Club and stayed connected in the industry, playing with top amateurs on a routine basis. After spending time as a real estate developer and the chief operating officer of a commercial real estate firm, he sold his business and moved his wife, Gigi, and children, Kate and Paul, back to Florida where he wanted a change of pace. When Demick was contacted by FSGA board members who recognized his immense golf and business backgrounds, everything clicked.
“I wanted to do something positive, something helpful,” Demick said. “I had been in the real estate industry which, although positive, it’s certainly not earth-changing. You’re trying to make money is what you are doing. I wanted to do something a little more beneficial to people.
“As the opportunity at the FSGA came up, I said, ‘Wow, this is an organization that can grow a lot more and do a lot more things.’ I thought I would help them for a few years and see how it would go.”
A few years became 24 in the blink of a golf swing.
Although Demick’s time captaining the FSGA is done and his retirement has begun, he still will have a hand in the game. For one, he is enthusiastic to play more golf himself. And for another, he is set to lead the Future of Golf Foundation to focus on the benevolent side of the association.
But speaking during his last days as a full-time staffer, he recognized it won’t be quite the same as it has been.
“It’s a mixed emotion,” Demick said. “Retirement is something you look forward to doing because there are so many other things you can do. But at the same time, I’ve just been on three different conference calls and on each one of those, I was invigorated and there are ideas flowing and talk of what you can accomplish. I’ll miss a lot of it very much.”
There may be fewer conference calls from now on, but Demick’s influence will remain.
E-Mail Sean