MILL CREEK
The membership at Mill Creek Country Club is searching for a new head golf pro following the recent resignation of Don Montague, who had been at the club for several years.
The club has posted the opening with the Pacific Northwest Golf Association and the United States Golf Association, and the number of applicants already has reached 25, said Barney Dotson, the president of Mill Creek CC’s nine-member board of directors.
The club hopes to get through the interview process in the coming weeks, Dotson said, and hire a head pro sometime in March.
Mill Creek CC is “looking for someone that is a teacher and is enthusiastic, member-oriented and service-oriented,” Dotson said. “And I don’t want to put a number on it, but somebody who’s had a reasonable amount of experience.”
That experience, he added, need not be as a head pro.
“There are a lot of people that have been working as a first assistant who are looking for that opening,” Dotson said, “and we have to keep a door open to that. My take on things is, maybe it’s a guy who is very energetic and just waiting for opportunity to bloom, even if he hasn’t been a head pro somewhere.”
Some candidates are from the Northwest, he said, but others elsewhere in the country also have expressed interest.
“We wouldn’t restrict it to somebody just from the Northwest,” Dotson said. “We just have to look at qualities and the character and that sort of thing. But we’ve got 25 (applicants) and we’ve got some good ones. There are some people with a lot of background and they have some good qualifications.”
Last summer, Mill Creek CC completed a long legal process of converting from a corporate-owned club to a member-owned club. That change, Dotson said, has made the club’s current head pro job more attractive to prospective candidates.
“The corporate-owned clubs, and I could name a few, those (head pros) are pretty restricted,” he said. “They have to bow to the corporation. Whereas this being a member-owned club, it brings a different connotation to the membership. So it should be a big advantage (in hiring a top candidate).”
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