DUBLIN, Ohio (WCMH) — There’s one group at Muirfield Village Golf Club that takes the saying “practice makes perfect” to whole new level.
A team called “blue shirts” do the hard tasks behind the scenes to get the pros ready to take on Jack Nicklaus’ course.
“Well the whole thing is about hospitality,” said Larry Dornisch, the director of golf at Muirfield Village. “It’s making the players feel comfortable. It’s giving them what they want before they know they need it.”
The crew responsible for that is the 10-person blue shirt brigade.
“We’re running and gunning and hustling for awhile,” outdoor golf operator Jordan Seich said about the work.
The work for Seich and the blue shirts starts at 5 a.m. and goes until 9 p.m. with two waves of non-stop work. The pros go through more than 3,600 balls in a single day and their recycled by the blue shirts who operate like a well-oiled machine.
“We’ve always got somebody in the picker and every 15-20 minutes, we’ll run down, we’ll pick up a basket or two from them, bring them up here, toss them all into the ball washer here, feed out down there and then we usually have three to four guys in here tossing balls left and right,” Seich said. “They go right back in a bag, right back on a shelf and ready to go.”
The blue shirts are always finding ways to make sure the players are ready to take on Jack Nicklaus’ course.
“This is all about preparation and building confidence,” Dornisch said. “You know the idea is you get out on the golf course and you have a shot and you say hey I’ve hit it a hundred times on the range I know I can do it.”
Helping provide that confidence is not a responsibility the blue shirts take lightly.
“Their goal this week is to go out and play golf,” Seich said. “We want to take all the extra worries away from them so they don’t have to worry about anything else, think about anything else. All they have to think about is golf and if we come out here and do our jobs right, that’ll never be an issue.”