I Volunteered at a Korn Ferry Tour Event

Tune in as John describes his experience volunteering for the Colonial Life Charity Classic in Columbia, SC

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to the Southern State of Golf podcast. Hi, I'm your host, John, and we're excited to be a part of the Best Ball family of podcasts. So please go to Best Ball.com, check out all the great uh podcasts that are part of the Best Ball family. You've got the Whole Story podcast, you've got off the deck, pictures on the scorecard, and that's good. Pick it up. There's just so many great options to choose from. And if you go to bestball.com, you can check out information on the Best Ball Golf Club. It's a great online community built on one belief: golf is people. And that is so, so true. Well, we're excited that this week's episode, I'm going to talk about my experience volunteering at the Corn Ferry Tour event that was uh Colonial Life, uh, at the Colonial Life Charity Classic that was recently held at the Wood Creek Club. I'm going to just say it right off the bat. It was a fantastic experience. I loved it. I can't say enough good things about my experience volunteering at the Colonial Life Charity Classic. Now, if you go back and go back on episode eight of season two, we had our podcast where we talked about this with tournament director Chris Baker. And this was back in the way back in the day where we were kind of just getting started. It was kind of an idea that was going to happen soon. And, you know, touching base with Chris over the past few months, you could tell he was getting more and more excited. You could see more and more advertisements on TV, billboards around the city of Columbia promoting the Colonial Life Charity Classic. And now that it came and went, I will tell you, I think it was absolutely phenomenal, some of the great things. And this was the first time that they had the Colonial Life Charity Classic. And to my knowledge, it may be the first time a Corn Ferry Tour level event was held in, we call it Columbia, South Carolina. If you look on the website, it does say Elgin. Technically, the golf course is in Elgin, but might as well call this Columbia. The thing that I didn't know going into this was, I mean, and I, if you would have told me, even I didn't even know this until after the event, I was like, how many PGA Tour winners actually participated in this tournament? I would have said, ah, there was probably like three or four PGA tour winners. There were altogether 17 PGA Tour winners that had a total of 34 victories, which were led by Jonathan Byrd and Carl Peterson, each had five victories each. I had no idea there were that many PGA tour winners at the Corn Ferry Tour event. I will fully admit, this is my first time ever at a Corn Ferry Tour level event. You know, I've been to several charity golf tournaments before. I've been to the Masters once. I did volunteer one time at the uh, it used to be now Wells Fargo, used to be the Wokovia thing, like a Quell Holly years and years ago. But I really had no idea what to expect for a Corn Ferry tour event. Matter of fact, if I'm being truthful, I I really had nothing no idea. Like part of me was like, okay, there might be one big tent set up there, a couple of great registration tables. They'll do everything out of the clubhouse. Since this is kind of a minor league event, I will tell you, there was nothing that felt minor league about it for me volunteering there. It felt like a very big event. Like even there, they had they brought the trailers in that were workout trailers. They they had trailers there for the fittings. Titleist, I know had a trailer there. There were multiple different, this was a massive, massive event. And the Wood Creek Club, it's a Tom Fazio course, you know, that was, you know, that was built um years ago. I say years ago, early 2000s, late 90s, I believe. You know, so this is the first time that this uh event was held at the at the at the Wood Creek Club. And apparently they've signed on for a three to five year deal. So we're really excited about that. It's going to get to, you know, happen again. You know, one of the things that too that I did not realize how, like I said, how many high-quality people as far as players were in the event. They were saying there were eight players in the field that were in the top 200 of the world. The guy that probably got the most publicity was uh Blades Brown. He's the young youngster. I think he's 18 now. That um, you know, he's ranked number 120th in the world. He's now at a point in time in his golf career, like he recently even post uh Colonial Life Charity Classic, he's now at a point where he can choose whether does he want to play the rest of the year on the PGA tour and try to qualify for signature events? Or does he want to stay on the Corn Ferry tour where he's already, I think, around, I think they're 13th-ish in the standings, where the top 20 get their PGA tour card for next year, but don't get invited to signature events. You know, that's the one cool thing about learning, being more involved with understanding a Corn Ferry tour and different routes people take to get their PGA tour card. And there are many different routes to go to. And I didn't realize, like, you know, Blaze Brown as an 18-year-old has got some great options, but he's got some choices to make on how he wants to try and, you know, get his PGA tour card for next year. You know, does he bet on himself and play in the all PGA tour events where there's a little bit more risk about how well he'll do in that? Of course, he already played in a final pairing one time with Scotty Scheffler. He talked about that one time. But it was interesting that even while we were volunteering, while I was volunteering at the event, hear people talk about what is that Blaze Brown? It's about Blaze Brown. He's 18 years old and looks every bit of 18. I could probably say he looks younger than that. But, you know, let's I'll come back to some of that later. But let me talk about the volunteer package. To volunteer at a Corn Ferry Tour event, one of the things I did was you'd pay $50. I know that sounds crazy. Why would you pay $50 to volunteer? That doesn't sound like volunteering to me, but I think that's the way most of these um, you know, golf tournaments do it, even not ones near as big as a corn ferry tour. If you want to volunteer, you've got to pay a little something. Now, part of the $50, it's I think it's a it's a no-brainer. If if you're if anybody just automatically blows it off and says, I'm not paying anything if I'm volunteering, if I'm not getting paid, just listen. You know, $50 to volunteer. You got the official volunteer polo and hat. I'm wearing the hat right here. It was a solid polo. It was a Adidas polo, the solid white hat. You got your volunteer credential, which was cool, that allowed you to get into the event every day, even days you weren't working. We got complimentary food and beverages that provided by the lizards ticket. I mean, while I volunteered for my sessions, I never went hungry. And they also gave us five tickets that we could use any one day of the tournament if we wanted to give them to other people. So right there, each day alone was uh each ticket was $20 a day. So you were, they were getting five, you can distribute them however you wanted. So that was pretty, that's that alone was great. But if you volunteer for four shifts, you get an opportunity to play the Wood Creek Club at their volunteer appreciation outing. That's coming up soon. I haven't done that yet, which I'm super pumped for. So I volunteered, I paid $50, I got a cool polo, got a great hat, got good food, a lot of connections, got five tickets to the event, and I'm going to get an opportunity to play uh the private Wood Creek Club. Uh, sign me up. I mean, it was a no-brainer. You even take the last part out where I don't get a chance to play the Wood Creek Club, I'd still do it. I would do it again next year. I probably shouldn't say that part too loud. I don't want them to take that part out. The key was to that last part, you must volunteer four shifts. Maybe you didn't want to, you couldn't volunteer four shifts. Maybe you only could volunteer accomplish. Still worth it. Well worth the opportunity. So the one thing I will say, you know, I and I I got a gut feeling that my experience with this corn tour ferry event was not going to be completely dissimilar from maybe other events, other corn ferry tour events. So if there's a place, you know, around where you live and it's got a corn ferry tour event and they're, you know, got an opportunity to volunteer, go do it. Even if it's like only a couple of sessions you can volunteer. Pay 50 bucks, well worth it. If you love golf, I would say if you love golf, there's a lot of different opportunities and things you could do to volunteer. I actually participated in two parts of it. My first thing that I did was access control. And that was around the clubhouse. I did that on Monday, the week of the event, where I showed up and I was supposed to only let like caddies, players, and other people that had a particular credential. And I actually got stuck on the side door of the clubhouse that ended up turning into the main door because they were still doing work on the brand new clubhouse there at Wood Creek. And Wood Creek's new clubhouse, Pro Shop, whatever you want to call it. It was beautiful. I mean, it was fantastic. It was so new that when I went in and used the restroom, they didn't even put the on the doors yet which one was the men's restroom, which one was the women's restroom. You could smell the fresh paint in the air. It just looked phenomenal. It was amazing. But that was a great Monday job. Access control was actually, you know, Monday's pretty low-key, as it turned out, for the week. And really the only people coming in and out of the clubhouse were either caddies, players, event workers. There was never any problem where I had to tell them, nope, sorry, you can't come in through this door because I'm going to lock this thing up. And I, you know, I held the door open for a lot of different people, got to talk with some caddies, some players. And I can't begin to tell you how nice everybody was. I mean, it was really cool to connect with them, talk to them a little bit, and if they wanted to talk more, we talked a little bit about uh golf, where they're from. I mean, there's one guy that played Oklahoma State. We talked about, went to Oklahoma State, played golf in Colorado. I mean, I know we talked about rodeo dunes that was coming up open. I mean, it was just really cool to get to meet the people, and they saw my credential that I was a volunteer, and immediately I'm just immediately said, Hey, thank you for volunteering. And that is unbelievable to me how often that I heard that. And I think that was so good because you can genuinely see how appreciative people were. But that was an easy job that I had that first day. I only did that one time. And I gotta believe that might have actually been a little tougher job to do later on in the week if you actually had to tell people that were just random walking around. Let me go in here. Sorry, I can't if you don't have your credential. Maybe I would, maybe it wouldn't, but I would certainly do that particular job again. It was really cool. My next job that I did, and this is the one I did for the next three sessions that I volunteered, was the practice range. That was one I circled right off the get-go that I thought could be a whole lot of fun. I think it would have been great to do it, and I was 100% right. Now, I didn't have any idea really what to expect at the practice range. Like, like, what are they gonna have me do? They're gonna have me pick up balls and whatever. Well, our main job, honestly, was when they had when pros would come over, we had a tent set up, we had two stacks of balls. We had Pro V1s and Pro-V1Xs. And we just tell them, hey, this is the red, this is the black, you know, which ones do you want? And we would sort them out and give it to them. Now, when the people at the range would go run their, you know, tractor or whatever to go pick up the balls, they would bring us a big tub of balls. Then we had to sort out the different, you know, pro V1s, pro-v1 Xs, and put those into the different bags. Super duper easy. And I also did the practice range on that first day on Monday, and it was a super easy job because I did a little bit later today. It started getting a little busy, and we just I started sorting. I think I've sorted like two or three big uh buckets with other people. There were some really cool people we had an opportunity to work with, and that was what we did. Pro V1 X's, pro-V regular Pro V1s. And, you know, it was interesting to see during the week who wanted what. Some people didn't care. Some was like, I definitely want the X's. You know, it it was really kind of a cool thing uh to do. I mean, it was cool. Like there was, you know, our table, we're all kind of looking at these, like, these are their practice balls. These are pro v1, pro v1 Xs. These are thousands of thousands of dollars that are practice balls. And the way I was told was that these balls are can be used week after week, and they're maybe shift from one corn ferry tour event to another. Someone even told me that down in um in the, I think the Bahamas or Bermuda beginning of the year, they don't ship those balls back because it costs more to ship them back than they're really worth it. So they just let the range or the people down there keep those particular balls for that year. But it was really cool during the week just to watch these pros and the caddies. It was really interesting, too, to see you know some caddies where they're doing everything for their player. And some of them, you couldn't, you know, being honest too, some of them couldn't figure out, were you an actually player or you a caddy? You know, sometimes the caddies, he's carrying the bag and grabbing it, and the caddies fall up behind. It was interesting to see the dynamics of the people on the range and watch their practice routines, how some of them were super dialed in. There was a guy from Track Man there that had a bunch of different track man that, you know, a player needed help with his track man or needed to borrow a track man. And it was interesting to see that, uh, how that goes. You'd see guys that would spend an hour or two on the range and they're just beating balls, and you're like, he's done the same thing over and over again. And their misses were by a handful of feet, whereas mine are large amounts of yards and distances, left and right, north and south. I mean, they're their misses. Like I remember watching one guy, like, he was really upset about a shot that I I couldn't, I couldn't even figure out what he missed because he was doing the same thing over and over and over again. I'm sure he had good reason, but it was just amazing watching these guys, how far they kill it. You know, some caddies would stand directly behind them, the guy would hit it, throw them another ball. Some of them the guy did all of it, some of it the pro would film from, or the caddy would film behind. You know, it was just really fascinating to see how people operated differently. There's a beautiful chipping area over there, had sand trap. First of all, the I heard a lot of the pros and caddies say that Wood Creek Farm's driving range, practice range is one of the best that they've seen on the tour. It's just, it seemed really big. I mean, the range did seem really big. It was a, you know, really cool to see. Like, you know, one of our jobs too was we had to sweep the balls off the putting green and off the chipping area, then sort those a little bit, you know, try not to, you know, stay out of the pros area. I mean, that was another thing. We were we're not, we weren't supposed to on the practice range uh socialize with the players. I mean, so we could talk to them, you know, if they talk to us, but don't go up there and bother them. Apparently, there was one day where one particular guy went up to all the guys and while they were trying to work on their craft and you know, take pictures and selfies with them. I did not see that, but I heard that happen. So, you know, that these guys that are there, this is their job. Like they're there to, you know, I imagine all 99 or at least 95% of them, they're all trying to get on the PGA tour, trying to get better. They're like I said, there may be a handful of people that maybe they're just there to play, and you know, because they maybe they're on the downside of the career and just want another opportunity to do it. But I will tell you this if you love golf, you love watching professionals, you like talking to different people, because that was the thing, too. You know, like I just may have said that you're not supposed to talk to people, but you still get an opportunity to talk to people. You know, even you know, all the people, the caddies, too, they all said thank you. I don't think I I can't remember a single time where I felt anybody was rude or anybody took anything that we were doing for granted. I was very pleasantly surprised. I first of all, I'm one of those that truly believe most people are friendly, most people are nice. Um, but I also realized that even on a Corn Ferry Tour level event, that there's gonna be some prima donnas out there. But the people that we ever interacted with or the people came by, they were always, they were really nice. I can't, there's nobody that I'm rooting against. There might, you know, you know, there's times when maybe if you met somebody that, you know, doesn't come off real well, they're arrogant, and you maybe don't root for them in certain other sporting events or other things in life because you just don't like how they treat people. There was nobody I came across with on this particular event. Everybody was really nice, very appreciative. And, you know, that was one of the things too that, you know, we we talk about at best ball, you know, golf is people. And I'll tell you what, that's what this event was about for me. It was the people. You know, there were so many cool people that we've met, talked to, re-engaged with again, you know, even down to Chris Baker. It was really cool to see Chris, you know, I'm sure he had a little bit of nervousness, excitement that he was a tournament director at an event for the first time um ever. Um, and and watching him like he never saw rushed. He looked like he was on calm, control, you know, doing what you want a leader to do. And I thought that was really cool. I spoke to him briefly because I certainly didn't want to take up too much of his time. But, you know, once again, he's very appreciative. Hey, thank you for volunteering. Thank you for being out here. He was great. Hope to get him back on the podcast soon. Love to talk to him. But one of the cool things, too, of my opportunities working on the practice range was that Chris Baker had his dad volunteering out there. I had an opportunity to uh work with Chris's dad on the practice range, and he was awesome. I we just loved talking golf. We talked about Indiana football, which I know he's from the Midwest, but I just love how the whole family. I think uh Chris's mom was there working at the event too, and it was just awesome seeing that the tournament directors, mom and dad, were there volunteering at the event as well. You know, Chris's dad was talking about he was going to be a scorer one day at when the tournament was going on, and he was telling me that while he was a scoring, he had to take a like a maybe have like a it wasn't an iPhone, or maybe it was where he had to take a video or a picture of every shot that a player took. And it was just interesting to hear the different dynamics of that particular great. But Mr. Baker was just phenomenal to work with, hard worker, and just great attitude. I mean, it was it was just really, really cool. Also got an opportunity, I ran into uh Mr. Bob Gillespie out on the course. He was covering the event coming out in the media, which I when I think of Mr. Gillespie, to me, he's like one of Mr. You know, Mr. South Carolina golf when it comes to uh riding. Like if there's a guy that you know understands golf in South Carolina when it comes to writing, putting it out there in the media, it's Mr. Gillespie, you know, to get to talk to him. And I've met him years ago, my days working with the Capital City bombers and being involved in sports here in Columbia. Got to chat with him for a good little bit of time and invited him to get him to come on our podcast at some point in time. So I'm very excited about that. You know, even got an opportunity to speak with uh um Jonathan Byrd, five-time PGA tour winner and also Spring Valley High School alum, you know, which was a cool thing. Spring Valley High School, we were just like less than 10 minutes away from Wood Creek Club. And get to talk to him once again. He was so gracious. We got to talk for a few minutes. And he once again, hey, thank you for volunteering. Appreciate you being out here. You know, Jonathan came up one stroke short of uh making the cut uh at the event. I mean, he didn't have a great Thursday, but man, he played really well on Friday. I got to walk many holes watching him and his group play, and man, Jonathan made some outstanding shots. I mean, it was just really cool to watch him play and you know, see him converse with others on the course and watch his routine. I mean, this is a five-time PGA tour winner, and he's out here competing very well on a Corn Ferry tour event, but you know, like I said, he didn't even make the cut. He's a five-time PGA tour winner. You know, Jonathan's, you know, not quite 50 yet, I don't think, but man, it was just really cool to get to watch him play, you know, and compete there. I even got to meet a guy named Ryan Murray, who's a caddy on TikTok. I think he's gotten now up to 17,000 followers. I just got to talk to him on the bus, on the bus from the parking lot over to the golf course. He was really cool and gracious to talk to. It was really, really interesting. You know, one of the things too that I thought was really cool, I talked to several caddies there, and there was a couple of them, you know, there was a couple of veteran caddies that were out there that, you know, that have, you know, caddy for PGA tour winners, and this is what they've done their whole life. And, you know, Ryan's, you know, first go go check out Ryan Murray at TikTok. He's got a great story where he's learning, shouldn't say learning. He is a PGA or he is a Corn Ferry Tour caddy, and you know, the things that you do. I mean, there's one caddy I met and talked to, he didn't even have a job this week. You know, of the of the uh Colonial Life Charity Classic till he got here. Then he got on the bag, I think is the the lingo they like to talk about. And he found a person that to to to connect with. And I hope I don't know exactly how they did, because you know the big thing is making cuts out here. I mean, that's a big thing for these people to do. Because I don't know, I wish I would have researched, I tried to research this, but I don't know for sure. Like, I don't know, do they get anything if they don't make the cut at a Corn Ferry tour event? I actually don't think they make anything if they don't make a make a cut. And that was another thing, too, just trying to understand the financial aspect. I would imagine most of these people, they don't make money. When they go on these different events, like, can anybody take a guess? What does the winner of the Colonial Life Charity Classic make? You know, this year's winner was uh Cole Sherwood. He made $180,000, which is that's great. Number two, Zach Blair, you know, Tree Farm, which, if I'm gonna say a disappointment for me, my disappointment was I didn't get an opportunity to say hello to Zach Blair. Our paths never did cross for whatever time. He came in second, he got 90,000. Uh, third place was Kyle Westmoreland. He had 60,000, and it just goes down and down. You know, where you get to like the people from seven through 11, they made $27,000. And the last place person, they were tied at 84th, they made $3,610. $3,610. And you're like, well, that's great. That's still that's a good week's amount of money. But then you go in to see how much, what were their expenses? Now, what I don't know is like, what did they have to pay to enter the tournament? If anything, that part I don't know. But what I do know is a lot of caddies, it seems like a caddy fee is somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500 for the week. And then there's a fee on top of that. It could be anywhere from between 5% and 7% on their winnings after the fact. So if you say this guy made 35, 3,600, and you go ahead and take off the top, let's say 1,500, that's $2,100. And then if there's 5% of that, you know, you're down to $2,000, and then you've got to pay for your, you know, uh Airbnb or hotel. I mean, that could be anywhere between three to $500, $600, depending on how they do it, their food. I mean, these people are not, some of these people are losing money. Because I do know it's interesting to see when, you know, especially at the bottom of the Corn Ferry tour, there's a lot of these people, they're they're losing money. Because sometimes they bring other people with them as well. You know, there's, you know, it's it's just really interesting to see. And then certainly these caddies, I mean, there's like I said, it's not completely uncommon. I've heard this other places where caddies will go to these events, just trying to get on a bag, just trying to get a job. Sometimes they go there and they don't have a job and they've already invested the money to fly somewhere, hotel, maybe even a car. Now, I do know that the the Corn Ferry Tour event and even Chris Baker said there they tried to, there were certain people that had a caddy or players staying with them uh during this time, like putting them up and trying to, you know, just uh, you know, volunteer to get people to come stay with them so these guys could save money. I mean, there's not a whole lot of people making a ton of money on this. One of the other great people that I met that I really enjoyed getting to spend some time with, and I didn't want to use his name because I didn't ask for permission, but one of the guys that was the uh volunteer coordinator of our area at the practice range, he was an MMA fighter. The MMA fighter that also he ran training, fighting training for the local law enforcement um uh here in in Columbia with Richland County. And he was just a great guy to talk to. And, you know, it it was just interesting to hear his perspective on different things. And we talked about MMA fighting, we talked about golf, you know, and that's the thing. Golf, you know, um is people, and people is golf. I mean, there were so many just great stories getting to talk to different people. There were people that are members of the club that were there volunteering for the week. And there's some people that just wanted to volunteer a couple of times just to get out the house and you know, see the course and talk to different people. So it was really just such a cool, cool thing. You know, one of the things when I volunteered on the Wednesday of the event, that's when they had the program. That is when the range was without a doubt its busiest. I was absolutely, we were slammed. I mean, at any point in time, I think we had four or five of us that were on on you know on working on a shift on the range, and part of it, like I said, was sorting golf balls into the different bags, pro V1 X's, regular pro-vs, pickup bags after players would use them, you know, just try to keep the practice area clean. And, you know, with the Pro Am, that's when you had the pros and the amateurs. And that was the interesting part. There was a section when the amateurs came for the pro-am, they're supposed to say on a little bit further down and weren't really supposed to completely mingle with the pros, but sometimes they did. And honestly, I didn't see that being an issue, but it was an interesting thing sometimes when you had some of these uh amateurs who were some of these were high-dollared uh uh sponsors, uh, and tell them, uh no, you can't go here. You've got to go practice down there on the side, and do that with a certain amount of class. And and most everybody understood it well. But it was just really cool. Like there was one guy sitting in our tent. I mean, big old tall dude. And I was like, who's this guy just sitting right down there, putting his shoes on inside our tent where we're supposed to be handing out balls and new idea. Then I looked up, oh, that's Alex English. Yes, sir, that's Alex English. Um, then there was uh Danny Brown for On Patrol and uh Live PD. You know, he was there part of uh supposed to be there for the pro-am and I didn't get an opportunity to see him, but Lenore Sellers and Connor Shaw, uh, you know, just seeing those different types of people from our Columbia area, I thought that was a pretty cool thing. Watch them, you could fairly easily tell which guys were there as pros. And those guys that were amateurs, when you watched them on the range, you could tell, yep, amateur, amateur, pro, pro, pro, pro. Every once in a blue moon, if you just by the looks of them, you say, you know, I didn't, I never wanted to insult the pros. Said, are you an amateur? Never wanted to do that. Thankfully, I don't think I ever did that. But, you know, and even all those people, you know, the the amateurs, the pros, and when they came through our practice range, they were all so gracious. I mean, it really was. It was, you know, it's good to see people so appreciative for the opportunity. You can even tell the amateurs that were playing in a program. They were just, they were thankful to be there. I'm sure some of them paid me thousands of dollars to be a part of that. But it was such an overall well-organized experience. I mean, you know, Chris Baker and his entire staff, they it was phenomenal. I mean, it really was. I was so blown away how organized everything was. And uh Eventive Sports, which they've, you know, if you go to their website, uh eventivesports.com, I mean, they you can see that they do a lot of different events. They're one of the leaders in sports event management, and you can just tell how very well organized they are. I mean, we were, as a volunteer, we received emails constantly, especially leading up to the event, when our shift was, what we should wear, what we shouldn't wear, what we could do, what we can't do. I mean, anybody really can't say that they weren't well informed. I mean, if you weren't well informed, that's because you didn't read your emails, you didn't pay attention. They even had opportunities to come in for optional training for your different tasks. Um, I would have gone if I didn't have anything to do, but I had actually work and do different things. So I didn't go, but there was probably no need for me to go to that training. But you could tell they thought of a lot of different things. I mean, it was, you know, one thing that I was probably leery about the most about this whole thing was parking for this particular event, because, you know, most golf clubs are not set up for mass spectator parking. They're just not. They're they're set up for member parking, member play, maybe a semi-large member event, but they're not set up for a mass tourism type event. So parking for the Colonial Life Charity Classic was an off-site area that it was about an eight-minute drop bus ride, but the the shuttles ran constantly enough on those particular days. I don't think I waited any longer than maybe eight minutes for a shuttle at any point in time. And honestly, I really enjoyed my time on the shuttle. That's where I got to talk to some caddies, other different people about their experience. And everybody was just so pleasant. So I may say the parking was a challenge, but it wasn't, you know, because my concern is like I if I wanted to go, I didn't want to have to wait a long line to get on a shuttle, then drive another 10 minutes and then be able to leave or show up. You know, I'm we we're in a society where, you know, all that stuff matters. You want what you want, and you want it as soon as you possibly can get it. And if you see a bottleneck in the process, whether it be parking or anything like that, that's gonna cause you not to like it. But that was, I had no issue with my experience there with parking. Now, I didn't leave at any time where a lot of people are leaving at once. So maybe there were some challenges with that. But you could just tell everything was organized so, so well. I just didn't see it. If I'm gonna give one, and it's not criticism, maybe it is a criticism, but if this is the, and I'll say this too, if this is the worst I got, it's pretty good, is the fact they didn't have a huge selection of tournament gear. They didn't have a to buy at their pro shop. You know, they had a few things, they had a few Colonial Life Charity Classic items, but they didn't have a ton of them. And I even kind of heard them say, hey, we didn't expect it it would be so popular. Actually did get me a Yeti um, you know, mug, or it's not mug, but you know, Yeti cooler that I'm I'll carry around in my golf bag. That was phenomenal. There was a cool looking Sunday red pullover that I wanted, but I just I couldn't spend $150 on that particular pullover. I just couldn't. Um I did get a Wood Creek hat, which I thought was really, really cool. I got it right here for our YouTube people. It's got the got a duck on it. I thought that was really neat. But I would have liked to maybe another pullover, a hoodie of some sort. But you know, I don't think they even that was if you want to say there's one thing they didn't anticipate great, it's probably that they didn't anticipate that type of demand for gear. Um, their pro shop at Wood Creek was really cool. I had some great, great stuff in there. Could be a challenge for me when I go back and play at the volunteer event here soon, because I'm certainly I'm I know I'm gonna want to buy some things. But they did an overall awesome job. And this is why I want to really encourage people. If you want to get involved in golf, if you want to have fun with golf, go volunteer at an event. I got to believe even these PGA tour events, I think they all have different ways where you can volunteer. Go to a corn ferry tour event, maybe reach out a local high school event. You know, these are great ways to see people play golf and you know, just get involved and meet different people. Like I said, I had a blast. I will certainly do it again next year. If my I would say, yeah, I'm I don't want to throw the caveat out there. I said, well, I'll volunteer if my schedule works. My my schedule really didn't work to do it this year, but I made it a priority. Let me do it. Because, you know, volunteer-wise, I could pick the different times I could volunteer and the different times, you know, that I couldn't. I mean, it was a certainly challenging week for me as a high school AD to do it, but I was able to make it work. Um, maybe, you know, some weeks are more difficult than others where maybe you can't volunteer the four shifts, or but maybe you can only do two. A lot of these different events, they'll take what they can get. And, you know, it was just for me being around golf, seeing good golf, seeing a great golf course, and just talking to people, completely worth it. So I'd highly encourage you. Go if you got a some type of pro event or amateur event in your area, and you're like, I don't know if I want to volunteer, give it a whirl, give it a try. Especially corn ferry tour event. Like I really can't speak enough good things about it because I got a feeling that as a first-year event, this thing was so well organized. There's some other corn ferry tour events, like really cool courses all along the Southeast and frankly the world for that matter, where you got an opportunity to volunteer. Maybe you pay, maybe you actually got to pay 50 bucks, but that's part of entertainment. Maybe you want to connect with different people. Like there's some great experiences like I had from this event that I'll talk about for a long time. It was something that's very important to me. So love to hear your thoughts. I'd love to hear have any of y'all volunteered at a golf event? You got some great stories. I would love to hear it. Hey, shoot me an email, southernstate of golf at gmail.com or connect with us on Instagram, our ex at SSOGolf. I'd love to hear your stories. I'd love to even hear your stories if you had an awful time. Maybe you got stuck with an awful job at an event you'll never do again. I I love those stories as well because those make for great stories. And but I'm sure that I'll have a lot more stories if people volunteered at different events. They'll have more stories of maybe the people that they've met, just the different things that they saw. And hey, maybe I had some really cool things out of it too. Hey, thank you for your time. Listen to another episode of the Southern State of Gulf. Take care.