Mark Luttik grew up in the Netherlands, earned his skiing chops in the Swiss Alps, and then, when life happened to him, drifted away from it for 17 years.The man and his root systems are thick as thieves. One stroll around Sycamore Hills Golf Club will tell you that.
Fairways so green they look painted, even in the thirsty height of summer, wind in and out among the sycamores that give the place its name. Chuckling little streams and man-made lakes guard this green or that. Flowerbeds alive with pinks and whites add the proper accents to the portrait.
And it’s this man over here who wields the paintbrush.
His name is Jeff Geller, and he’s the head groundskeeper at Sycamore Hills. He’s the man responsible for setting up the golf course for the Junior PGA Championship this week. And, yes, he is definitely a man who knows his root systems.
Everything he is, after all, is due to those root systems.
Start with where he grew up, just six miles north of here, on a farm in northwest Allen County. That’s where he learned to appreciate the value of soil, and all the ties that bind a man to it. His life’s path was set.
“I had some other interests as well,” says Geller, 44. “But I think it was my roots that drew me back to growing things and trying to get into the plant health aspect side of things. I saw my dad and uncle for years work on the farm, and of course I was interested in that type of work.”
And so as a kid he started working at Eel River Golf Course in Churubusco, and when the time came for college he went to Purdue to study agronomy. Then it was off around the Midwest, where he helped build golf courses and became superintendent of a Jack Nicklaus course in Canton, Ohio.
In 1997, he got the chance to come back to his hometown and work at Sycamore Hills – a place almost in his backyard, and whose own roots he had a hand in putting down.
“I helped build the golf course,” he says. “The day I graduated from college, I started here the very next day.”
It happened because the Sycamore Hills superintendent at the time had been at Fort Wayne Country Club, and Geller had worked for him there. He asked Geller to help out on the new project, so from 1988 to 1991 Geller worked at Sycamore Hills, helping build the place from the ground up.
Six years later he returned to the place where he had planted his roots.
“It was just unbelievable,” he says. “This is just a wonderful place to work.”
And a challenging place, particularly when the weather turns as wildly extreme as it has this summer. Everything about a golf course’s condition is dictated by the weather; what Geller and his crew do is simply respond to whatever the weather chooses to do.
“Every day you can have the best game plan in place you can possibly think of putting together, but every morning you have to wake up and actually revamp your plans because the weather is going to dictate what you can and can’t do,” Geller says.
That’s been especially true this summer.
“It certainly has (been challenging) from a standpoint of trying to maintain intensely maintained turf,” Geller says. “When it gets really, really hot like it has been the last couple of weeks, you have to really be careful because you have to try to only mow early and try to limit the traffic in those areas that will really stress in those conditions.”
Because the goal at Sycamore Hills is to provide a “championship experience” every day, Geller says they don’t really try to trick up the course for major events like the Junior PGA. The main concern is simply to provide a dry, firm, fast track.
“The weather dictates a lot of that, but we’ll try to have the golf course firm and fast,” Geller says. “In an event like this we try to tweak a few things, but for the most part it’s going to play like it would for our members and guests day in and day out.”
