Born to live and breath golf, I was thrown into the world of Golf Course Architecture by a chance meeting in 1986 with Ross Perrett at the opening of the Cape Country Club in Cape Schanck, Vic at the young age of 14. I immediately sought a career in Golf Course Architecture from that point on. Having kept in contact with Ross and his design partners, (Michael Wolveridge and Peter Thomson no less!), over the remaining school and university years, my passion for golf continued to grow.
Following 5 years at University and a brief stint at the M.C.G. as a groundsman, I was able fulfill my boyhood dream of joining the team at TWP in 1995. For the next 16 years I was privileged to work on 100’s of jobs for these three great men and travel the world designing and building golf courses including Dent Is G.C., Tianjin Fortune Lakes G.C., Moonah Links G.C. Development, The National G.C. Redevelopment, the remodeled Ballarat G.C. & Manly G.C.’s and the new Black Bull G.C. at Silverwoods to name but a few. Following a sudden downturn in the China market in 2011, there was a mad scramble to secure work for the immediate term and an opportunity to explore the contracting side of the industry presented itself; the timing of which could not be ignored. Possibly the hardest professional decision I ever had to make, leaving TWP, in effect my family, to join the Golf Course Contracting firm Turnpoint, was literally a turning point point in my life. Now I was exposed to the technical side of logistics, budgeting, costing, project delivery, managing 100’s of staff across the maintenance and construction divisions which any one time could involve the maintenance of some 12 courses across the country and the construction of at least one if not two jobs simultaneously from one end of the country to the other. Throw in some landscape construction jobs to boot and there was literally no time to think. Not long after I joined the firm in 2014, Programmed Maintenance P/L acquired the Turnpoint business and joined it to its stable of established grounds maintenance contracts set within its Property Services Division which operated around the country.
Today, Programmed employ anything up to 30,000 people on any given day, while the Turnpoint business still maintains a large number of courses across the country and is always looking at construction and redevelopment opportunities within the industry, whether they be new green field developments such as our Cape Wickham G.C. on King Is, redevelopment of existing courses such as our recent one at the Shortland Waters Golf Club in Newcastle or just minor re-bunkering works for our existing maintenance contracts such as that undertaken recently at the Mollymook G.C. Being able to jump from design to maintenance and then to construction puts me into a very unique position to fulfill all the questions and challenges presented by clubs and projects within the golf industry. I am still as passionate about golf today as I was nearly 35 years ago and still love playing as much as I can at my beloved National Golf Course – albeit off a +1 handicap thanks mainly to the new handicapping system, otherwise a gracious 4 or 5 would be my preferred number of strokes asked.