By Bob Carney
Five years ago, Pat McCormack found what he calls, borrowing from Edgar Allan Poe, the “Tell-Tale Chart.” McCormack, a retired financial analyst who has made it his mission to find kids who’ll caddie, says the chart, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, explained much more clearly than anything he’d ever heard of or read about why youth caddies had virtually disappeared. And why it’s at the heart of new successful efforts to bring youth caddies back.
“Big changes happen for big reasons,” said McCormack, who has helped build the caddie program at Brooklawn Country Club in Fairfield, Connecticut. “The decline of youth caddie programs is no different.”
The chart revealed that teenage employment from 1980 to 2020 dropped from 60 percent to 35 percent and took with it the pool of kids who might caddie.
“The number of teenagers was roughly the same,” McCormack said, “but it got to the point where kids didn’t work. There were more year-round school programs. Families got more affluent. So, the kids went away, and into the breach stepped adult caddies. And they had to make a decent living, so up went the rates.”
And away, in many places, went one of the game’s great traditions.
Now youth caddie advocates, mostly former caddies like McCormack, are using incentives far beyond “it’s a great summer job” to bring kids to caddying and golfers to those kids. What’s better? Leadership training. Mentoring. College scholarships ranging from $1,000 stipends to full rides such as the Evans Scholarship, worth an average $120,000.
“It used to be that kids just found the caddie yards. Now it’s a matter of the caddie yard going to the kids. That’s the shift.”
Jack Mendesh, caddie development manager, Minnesota Golf Association
At elite clubs such as Seminole Golf Club in Florida and Baltusrol Golf Club in New Jersey, as well as munis such as Jackson Park Golf Course in downtown Chicago, Keller Golf Course in Minnesota and Common Ground in Colorado, a kind of re-seeding process has begun. Dave Cavossa, CEO of CaddieNow – which supplies caddies and technology to clubs around the country, about 30 percent of them kids – calls what’s going on a caddie “renaissance.” One state golf official likened it to the return of vinyl records. What it isn’t is an industry model that takes years to perfect and then is “scaled up.” (Play Golf America comes to mind.) The youth caddie movement is more organic, with local advocates leading the way.
“It used to be that kids just found the caddie yards,” said Jack Mendesh, caddie development manager for the Minnesota Golf Association. “Now it’s a matter of the caddie yard going to the kids. That’s the shift.”
Ed Brockner, who manages the East Coast expansion for the Western Golf Association’s Evans Scholarship, agrees.
“We’ve come to see it as a youth development program: recruit, train, mentor,” Brockner said. “Feed them into the caddying pipeline and some will win caddie scholarships, but all will learn a great deal along the way.”
The WGA seeks to have 1,500 scholars in universities by 2030 – it has about 1,100 now – providing the ultimate carrot to parents thinking of encouraging their kids to caddie. (East Coast Evans applicants have doubled in the past five years and have earned 100 scholarships, up from none a few years ago. McCormack’s club, Brooklawn, has 10 of them. Like many clubs, it also provides partial scholarships.)
Because of limited opportunities, this recruitment of kids has become hyper-focused, aimed at “good students and hard workers” who might well qualify for college scholarships. It’s done through non-profits, middle schools – often parochial – and organizations such as The First Tee and Youth on Course.
“It’s not the rifle approach. It’s the scalpel approach,” said Ed Mate, the CEO and executive director of the Colorado Golf Association, which owns the Solich Caddie and Leadership Academy in Colorado, an early standard for programs that use subsidies to golfers to pay for youth caddies while those kids receive mentoring and tutoring from a caddie “academy.”
What’s not a big part of this reseeding of youth caddies is the pitch to golfers themselves that it will make for “a better golf experience.”
“We’ve learned some things,” Mate said. “You don’t convince people to take caddies because it enhances their golfing experience. It’s not about that. It’s about finding golfers who want to give back and help and mentor these kids.” Adds Mendesh: “We don’t ignore the improved golf experience for the player, but we’re really focused on the community aspect of caddying and how it can literally change a kid’s life, whether he or she gets a scholarship or not.”
John Hand, a former caddie who has worked to increase youth caddying at Ekwanok Country Club in Manchester, Vermont, and Seminole in Juno Beach, Florida, said: “You can’t just go into a club and tell them how to play their golf.”
This “renaissance” often involves painstaking efforts to embed a few new kids in a professional caddie yard like Seminole’s, to convince sympathetic players to forgo golf carts and hire a caddie at clubs like Ekwanok and Brooklawn, or munis like Keller or Jackson Park.
“It’s noble, what we’re doing. It’s good. It’s good for the kids. It’s good for the clubs. It’s even good for the game.”
John Hand, former caddie
The Solich model has inspired other programs and academies, including the Caddie and Leadership Academy in Wisconsin, directed by Phil Poletti, another former Evans Scholar. He now has six chapters at six courses in the state, providing caddie opportunities as part of his leadership academy. Poletti says even the best intentions go awry if the newbies aren’t good loopers.
“I tell the kids, there’s no better experience than playing golf with a caddie,” Poletti said, “and no worse experience than playing golf with a bad caddie. I point to a cart and say, ‘That’s your competition.’”
Pulling teenagers out of “retirement,” also requires technology, and apps like Cavossa’s and other companies like Caddy Up, help caddie managers stay efficient in scheduling, eliminating or reducing sitting-around time in the caddie yard.
Mate calls subsidies “the new normal” of youth caddying, an essential ingredient in the process. John Kaczkowski, CEO of the Western Golf Association, says it’s going to be a blend.
“In some areas of the country the culture of taking caddies is strong, and I don’t think that will go away,” Kaczkowski said. “But I think there is a place for caddie academies and subsidized rounds.”
The WGA runs its own caddie academy in Chicago, training potential Evans Scholars who don’t live near a caddying opportunity and then transporting them to caddie jobs. (A model for these is the Sankaty Head Golf Club Caddie Camp on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, which has operated since 1930.)
How widespread is this “comeback”? That’s hard to quantify because even today, four years after that industry task force created a Carry the Game caddie initiative, there is limited measurement and COVID skewed what numbers there are. The National Golf Foundation estimates there are about 30,000 caddies of all kinds in the country, a “snapshot” it has not updated in a few years. The WGA’s Kaczkowski says he thinks about 15-20 percent of those are youth caddies.
“We need to do a better job of getting clubs to keep these stats and convincing them that they are valuable,” Kaczkowski said.
Colorado and Minnesota keep good numbers. Caddie rounds in Colorado went from fewer than 40,000 in 2014 to more than 50,000 in 2018. After a drop during COVID, they’re now over 49,000. Fully 44 percent of those are youth caddie rounds. Caddies mostly carry single bags and earn an education grant of $35 or so, with a typical tip of $20, far lower than the rates of some professional caddies, who might earn three times as much at elite clubs.
Minnesota has 20 caddie clubs around the state. In 2021, 25,000 of some 440,000 golf rounds involved caddies, youth and otherwise – almost 6 percent. Mendesh expects 2022 caddie rounds to surpass that. (He’s confident many of the kids who “exploded” his Youth on Course program during COVID will be potential caddies.)
Poletti has six “chapters” at clubs and courses around Wisconsin, with a total of about 50 caddies during any season.
Brian Bianchi, the former caddie manager at Baltusrol who now works for the WGA, says his association is feeding about 40 new youth caddies into the system a year in New Jersey, 26 in New York’s Westchester County and 15 on Long Island. In the right setting, increases can be dramatic. When Lakewood Country Club in Colorado went to a subsidized program as part of a west Denver initiative, it doubled caddie rounds, to 2,000.
“Every situation is different,” said Hand, who is also involved in the new West Palm Golf Park, a public venture on a Gil Hanse-designed course in West Palm Beach, Florida, where golfers who take caddies may have their caddie fee subsidized. The ultimate challenge is finding what Poletti calls “champions,” people like McCormack and his partner Bill Wallace at Brooklawn, Hand at Seminole, Mate in Colorado, and hundreds of others who work to recruit middle and high school kids to caddie.
“It’s a ground game,” McCormack said. “It can work in different ways in different places, but it comes down to people working it, making it happen. Somebody cares. Somebody gets involved. It can take time, but eventually it can happen.”
And when it does, a boy from Albania, in a Fairfield, Connecticut, middle school, takes up caddying, meets someone like McCormack and life changes. Ari Rexhepaj, now four years out of Miami of Ohio and working in the digital advertising business, was the first Evans Scholar from Brooklawn. “I was in an interview the other day and they asked about people skills, and I talked about caddying: how you meet smart and successful people; how you have to pay attention to detail; how you learn when and how you offer advice. It’s been an education by itself.”
The payoff, for kids and for the people whose bags they tote, can be profound.
“It’s noble, what we’re doing,” Hand said. “It’s good. It’s good for the kids. It’s good for the clubs. It’s even good for the game.”