Holding the annual Colorado Caddie Summit at Columbine Country Club on Wednesday seemed fitting.
There are Colorado golf courses with caddie programs that have been around far longer than the one at Columbine. And there are certainly bigger and more prominent ones.
But few, if any, clubs in the state feature caddie programs that have gone through the odyssey that the one at Columbine has.
In the 1960s, ’70s and into the early ’80s, Columbine had one of the top half-dozen or so caddie programs in Colorado. (The club hosted the 1967 PGA Championship, making it one of just two Colorado courses — along with Cherry Hills — that has held one of the PGA Tour’s Grand Slam events.) On weekends during the summer, it wasn’t unusual for 40 teenagers per day to show up for a caddie draw — in order to be placed in a manageable order — in hopes of getting a loop. And most did. (Full disclosure: I was a caddie at Columbine in the 1970s, and the caddiemaster there in the late ’70s and very early ’80s.)
Columbine produced eight winners of the Evans Caddie Scholarship from the ’60s through the early ’80s, during the time Tony Novitsky was the head professional at the club. The Evans Scholar recipients received full tuition and housing at the University of Colorado.
But unlike at places such as Cherry Hills and Denver Country Club and a few others, the caddie program at Columbine didn’t have an uninterrupted run over decades and decades and decades. Columbine’s program largely fell by the wayside — with a few individual exceptions — for quite a while during the late 20th century. But the story didn’t end there.
In 2002, Tom Alley revived the caddie program at Columbine, and with the support of Alley, Geoff “Duffy” Solich and others, the numbers have climbed to about 25-30 “core” caddies at Columbine last year, when roughly 1,200 caddie loops were done at the course. That’s up from the 1,100-plus the club reported in 2013. Columbine is one of just eight clubs in the state that produced more than 1,000 caddie loops in 2014, joining Cherry Hills (10,000), Castle Pines Golf Club (8,000), Ballyneal (7,000), Colorado Golf Club (3,044), Maroon Creek Club (2,199), Denver Country Club (1,600) and Eagle Springs (1,450).
“Having a couple members who were Evans Scholars or Western Golf Association leaders (Solich and Alley) has been huge,” noted Bryan Heim, the head golf professional at Columbine the last couple of years. “It’s not as big a program as say, Cherry Hills, but it’s definitely growing from a grassroots level. You look at other clubs that have professional caddies or college kids that come back. We’re really in that 14-18 (year-old range). That’s what I mean by grassroots.
“There’s a camp among the members that’s probably indifferent to (the caddie program), then there’s a really strong core that supports it 100 percent. It’s growing, it’s evolved and it’s gotten better.”
Solich and his brother, George, are CU Evans Scholar alums who lent their name to the Solich Caddie & Leadership Academy at CommonGround Golf Course. Like Alley, the Soliches are directors for the WGA, which administers the Evans Scholarship nationwide.
Caddie Summit Notes: About 50 people from golf courses in Colorado withstood adverse weather and driving conditions to attend the fourth annual Colorado Caddie Summit on Wednesday.
Results of the yearly survey of caddie clubs were distributed and discussed, and various club officials shared what they do to make their caddie programs successful, hitting topics such as recruiting, training and supporting/promoting their programs. There was an update on the Solich Caddie & Leadership Academy at CommonGround — where taking caddies is incentivized through the program paying for all of the caddies’ base fees; and Evans Scholars-related briefings from WGA director and state chairman Bob Webster and from WGA staffer Bill Moses.
“It’s just a great exchange of information and I always come away with a full notepad of ideas,” said Ed Mate, executive director of the CGA, which organizes the Caddie Summit. “The numbers (of attendees) were down a little bit from last year, I think mainly because of the weather. But I do think it’s important that we do this every year just as a reminder. It’s a motivator for everyone, and if you come away with one or two ideas, those can make all the difference in the world in making your program successful.”
The total number of reported caddie loops statewide in 2014 was 39,290, with Denver Country Club noting an increase of about 400 over 2013. A total of 22 clubs reported having caddie programs in 2014, whether with less than 10 core caddies or 180. While most are private or resort facilities, there are some at public courses, including the Solich Academy at CommonGround, and the First Tee Programs of Green Valley Ranch and of Denver.
