Herrmann: Assistant pros have tough jobs to love

So you want to have a career in golf. Fine. Start by realizing you will work many hours indoors while you watch other people go out to play; you'll make a meager seasonal paycheck with a distant hope of reaching the top of the ladder and you'll need to find a second job every winter.

This is the life of an assistant pro, a life that assistant pros wouldn't trade for anything.

"This is the reason I'm a golf pro," Jake Northrup, an assistant at Hempstead Golf & Country Club, said Wednesday at the Met PGA Assistants Championship at Bethpage Red. "I'm standing on the first green, looking out and saying, 'I could easily be doing something else, sitting in a cubicle or something. This is great.' "

Northrup and a growing number of others liked the idea of this life so much that they studied for it in college. In the late 1990s, he was one of the pioneers in the PGA Golf Management program, which dovetailed with his business marketing major at New Mexico State.

"You'd take normal marketing and sales classes. Then toward the end of the year, you'd have classes that would have to do with golf specifically, such as food and beverage, turf management, horticulture," said Northrup, who grew up near Buffalo. "It was about understanding the gross margin, cost of goods sold - things that would help you if you were to run a whole operation."

At 34, Northrup has yet to run a pro shop, which is one of the drawbacks in the assistant pro fraternity. It's really hard to land a head pro job because so few of them become open every year. Still, young assistant pros keep coming. Now they are coming from 20 colleges that have the PGA-sponsored program (a list is available at www. pgalinks.com; most local candidates go to Penn State).

Nick Bova, 25, an assistant at Friar's Head in Riverhead, was one of 68 golf management majors in his class at Methodist Univeristy in Fayetteville, N.C. Courses included rules and tournament operations, golf teaching, club fitting and repair. "Any aspect of the business, they had a class for it," the Bloomington, Ill., native said.

His freshman class started with 105 in the program. "We lost a good number because kids were coming to school thinking they were just going to play golf," Bova said. "Then they realized that's not what the golf business is."

That's the rub. Many assistant pros are so busy collecting green fees, keeping track of the carts and selling pro shop merchandise that they have to practice after work, on their own time.

Bova said he hasn't ruled out playing golf for a living. He did perform well at the Red on Tuesday and Wednesday, finishing 36 holes at 1 under par to tie for seventh. He was one of seven Long Islanders to qualify for the national assistants tournament later this year in Port St. Lucie, Fla. Others were champion Larry Scortichini of Baiting Hollow, runner-up Paul Dickinson of Montauk Downs, Kirk Satterfield (Sebonack), Matt Dobyns (Deepdale), Matt Sita (Nassau Country Club) and Bill Van Orman (Meadow Brook).

Chances are, though, the PGA Tour is not beckoning. An assistant pro's satisfaction is simply in going to work at a course every day.

Stephen Terrana is in his first year as an assistant at Hamlet Willow Creek. He didn't come out of a college golf management curriculum. "I was actually in public accounting for five years, a midsize firm in Hauppauge," the 28-year-old said after he shot 72. "Golf had always been a passion and the accounting business really didn't interest me. So I decided to do something that interests me. I just wanted to be happy.

"I took the opportunity to do it while I was still in my 20s."

Salary notwithstanding, he is more enthusiastic about helping people out of the rough than out of the red:

"You know what? A lot of people have really good swings, but their posture and setup are terrible. Some guy is aiming 40 yards left . . . that's why he gets the big slice. You can fix that and he'll start hitting it right down the middle."