Female tournament directors, such as Michigander Tracy West, are finding success across all parts of the PGA TOUR
By Helen Ross, PGATOUR.COM
Editor’s Note: This story first appeared on PGATOUR.com on March 19. Our thanks go to Helen Ross for granting permission to reprint. This is an edited portion of what she wrote; the entire piece covered multiple women.
Michigan native Tracy West was in her late 20’s and working at a company called Pro Links Sports, which managed a half-dozen golf events, mostly on PGA TOUR Champions. Part of her job was to recruit players to appear at special events. During this time, she also went through a couple of pregnancies – and the senior golfers came to view her as something of a daughter figure.
“In a way, it was easier for me to try and cajole them into playing in pro-ams and things like that,” West said. “They had to at least think about it a little more, probably, to say ‘no’ to me than maybe one of the male tournament directors right away.”
Now she’s the tournament director at the PGA Tour’s Valspar Championship, and part of her job is again enticing players to participate in her event. The requests, though, are not always as easy.
“Definitely not, because now I can be their mothers, right?” the soon-to-be 54-year-old said, laughing.
Even so, West has found the TOUR players welcoming – albeit sometimes surprised early on when she approached them on the range to encourage them to play in Tampa or to show her appreciation once they were there. One such encounter in 2015 stands out.
“I was going up … to thank this prominent player for playing that week,” West recalled. “It was late on a Tuesday afternoon and his wife was on the putting green with him. She looked at me and was like, ‘Oh my God. A female tournament director. This is fantastic. This is awesome.’
“So, yeah it was probably a bit of a novelty — which isn’t that long ago.”
In reality, what’s less of a novelty in each passing year is a PGA TOUR event run by a woman.
West, who joined the Valspar Championship in 2014, is not the first female tournament director on TOUR; there were three before her. But she is the longest-serving of the seven currently in position and the list is growing on PGA TOUR Champions and the Web.com Tour, too.
In addition, Alexandria (Alex) Baldwin was named in January to oversee the entire Web.com Tour – the first woman to lead one of the PGA TOUR’s six global Tours as president. And of the 27 events on that schedule, a third now have women as tournament directors.
Of the 1,100 or so employees at the TOUR, nearly half – 42 percent, to be exact – are female. And those women fill a variety of roles from sales and marketing to media officials and ShotLink coordinators to finance and accounting to digital producers and on-air talent to hospitality and child care.
“I’ve never really been privy to an organization that has had such a focus on elevating women within the workplace,” said Allison Fillmore, in her second year as tournament director of the TOUR Championship, the FedExCup finale…“The more we can hear from more people and more viewpoints, the better the product.”
West is a fourth-generation Sault Ste. Marie native who didn’t plan on getting into event management. After she got her MBA from Michigan State, she was handling economic forecasting and product management for a company in Grand Rapids.
After joining the Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1989, she volunteered at what was then-known as the Farmers American Classic, on what is now PGA TOUR Champions. West worked in corporate hospitality and media and served on the executive committee.
The behind-the-scenes work of putting on a golf tournament was intriguing. And the end result of money raised for charity made it seem that “life was more meaningful,” she says.
A meeting with Hollis Cavner during the 1992 tournament eventually changed the course of her life. Cavner had been working for the USGA as director of operations for the 1990 and ’91 U.S. Opens. But he had just been hired to launch the inaugural Burnet Senior Classic in Minneapolis and needed an assistant tournament director.
“We spent several hours together here and there during tournament week,” West says. “He called me the Monday after and said, ‘Do you want to make this a career?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely’ and my husband and I picked up and moved to Minnesota.”
Pro Links Sports was born. The company soon was managing several different events, and West helped hire and oversee the staffs. When Peter Mele left the BankBoston Classic to join the PGA TOUR, West took his position as tournament director and remained in that role for the next 10 years.
The event eventually lost its corporate sponsor, and West faced a decision: Move her family to stay in the golf business or take another job. She opted to join the Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital as signature director of development for its Home Base program focused on healing the invisible wounds of post-9/11 veterans and their families.
Six years later, Pro Links took over the management of the Valspar Championship. Once again Cavner came calling.
“Listen, there’s going to be a change in management here,” he said. “You need to come back into golf.”
So, she did – but still finds time to return home to Michigan once or twice a year.
