My Experience at The Barclays

For the past 6 months, I have had the privilege of working for the PGA Tour as the Operations Coordinator on The Barclays at Liberty National Golf Course in Jersey City, NJ. With a very minimal background in golf I was not sure what I was getting myself into until I actually started back in April. I was not aware that this is one of the five largest tournaments on the PGA Tour as well as the event with the most hospitality structures available on Tour. The Barclays is the first tournament of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, which is the postseason where the top 125 players compete for the FedEx Cup.

While a part of the Operations team I did a lot of planning and dealing with vendors whose jobs are to construct the venues, bleachers, concessions, as well as organize deliveries of all the necessary items for a successful event. There was a lot of responsibility that came with my position, which showed when the Tournament Services and Sales & Marketing interns were coming directly to me for help on specific operations questions. This job certainly consisted of long hours and hard work, especially during Advance Week and Championship Week, but to see how everything turned out in the end made it all worth it. The tournament week was great besides the poor weather that we had to deal with on Thursday causing six hours of rain delays that put a strain on the rest of the weekend schedule.

Again, the most rewarding part of the job was seeing the tournament go off without a hitch. All of our staff’s hard work for this one week had finally paid off and I don’t think I could have asked for a better group of people to work with either. From the interns to the full time staff or the over 1,500 volunteers that signed up to help make it a successful week, everyone’s time and effort really showed in the end. I was very shocked to see how much we rely on volunteers for such a large event and it was also great to see that other PGA Tour staff members from across the country come in for a week or two to support those who strictly work on The Barclays. The staff grew from 15 to almost 30 to ensure that every goes according to plan and after a great week of golf Adam Scott was crowned the champion of The Barclays.

Now that it is all said and done, I am proud to say that I was offered the same position with The Barclays next year to complete my 3^rd and final Co-Op. They are always looking for more interns for the spring and summer in preparation for the tournament so if anyone is interested I would highly recommend looking into it.

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Ryan Cuttler is a junior sport management student at Drexel University and a member of the Drexel Sport Management Student Union.