President's Report - Spring 2014

It is truly an honor and an opportunity to be able to address the membership of the WCTA.  For those of you who don’t know me well, hello and welcome.  Thank you for your investment and continued support of the WCTA.

For those of you that do, please don’t be afraid!!  The future of the Association and its direction is in good hands; the Board of Directors does all the hard work, I just get to go along for the ride!

We would like to do things a little differently though; firstly we would like to cover a series of topics over my term that may be a bit off the wall.  Perhaps that characterizes my personality to some degree but sometimes, we have to shake things up a bit if not only to realize we are doing things right.

Secondly, I would like to put the technical aspects of growing turf that we all know and love behind us for a moment and talk about the issues that affect our everyday lives.  We can and should address the things we don’t usually talk about: the economy, human resource management, financial accountability, our relationships with other associations, the marketing of the Turf Management professional and the future of golf superintendents and sportsturf managers in a changing world.

To begin with, let’s look at why we choose to be a member of an association, what the value of being involved in an association is and how public and private businesses regard that value. 

“An association is a group of persons, having common views, associated or organized for a common end. The main feature of an association is that it is meant for certain definite purpose or purposes, which are realized through the co-operative efforts of its members”.

The Board of Directors of an association cannot do everything.  The main purpose of its organizations is the achievement of certain limited purpose through combined action.  In short, all associations or social organizations exist to satisfy some important human wants.  Man is a bundle of instincts but his social instinct is the most dominant.

How then do we decide where the value is in an association, for its members and the industry we are all involved in?

We are presently living through economic times in the turf industry we have not experienced in years.  These economic pressures have affected golf courses, municipalities and landscape related industries in general.  With these pressures we are seeing substantial cutbacks in overall budgets with the end result being cutbacks in supervisory wages, continuing education and association involvement.

This economic trend then, is not to produce more associations but to utilize and capitalize on the strength of like-minded groups to provide greater value.  Outside the business of golf, the world economy is telling us to synergize and to find the answers to our questions outside our fields of expertise.  We must embrace those other disciplines and take that new found information and apply it to our own fields of expertise.

Does it matter where you get the knowledge you need to succeed, as long as you get the information?  To me, this is the most important question.  More importantly, is it a question your association can answer?

Are you receiving the value you deserve from your association and does your employer benefit from the information your association provides?

Thanks for taking the time to read this, the next topic will be the overstated and under applied use of human resources.

Sincerely,

Trevor Smith President, WCTA