Tim C:
I've slowly but surely built up the stable of guys. At High Pointe it was just myself and Tom Mead the construction super -- I pretty much shaped the whole place, with a bit of help here and there from guys on the crew.
At The Legends there was a shaper named Don Charles, who was pissed off that I insisted on going back onto the greens and shaping them myself. Gil Hanse joined for The Legends and stayed for Black Forest and Stonewall. Mike DeVries also worked at The Legends and Black Forest.
Jim Urbina worked freelance on Charlotte Golf Links, then decided to stay full-time. Bruce Hepner joined about the same time, prior to Quail Crossing.
Don Placek joined in 1996, and Eric Iverson started doing freelance stuff for us about the same time, at Riverfront, although he did his own thing for a few years before coming back to us full-time.
Brian Slawnik was an intern at Beechtree, worked on projects for us and for a couple of others, then started full-time at Pacific Dunes.
Brian Schneider started with us for the second course at Stonewall ... he'd worked a bit with Kye Goalby, who we've worked with off and on since Apache Stronghold.
Chad Grave was an intern at Barnbougle, and has been with us since.
We've also benefitted from the service of Tony Russell and his guys, from Jerame Miller who built the greens at Lost Dunes, and from Chris Hunt and Dan Proctor and a bunch of our recent interns who are still somewhere in the system. I should share all of their names, too, but frankly I'm tired of other architects trying to lure them away.
The only problem with this approach is that either I have to keep taking MORE JOBS for these guys to advance, or I have to let a lot of them go help somebody else instead of us.
We have worked with golf course contractors, too -- with Allan MacCurrach (who I know from when we were both skinny young kids on Pete Dye's construction crews) and with Landscapes Unlimited and with Weitz Construction. In early days I didn't do that much because they resisted our desire to include our own shapers in the process. Now that we have a track record, they are quite happy to supply machinery and irrigation crews and support staff but to let me rely on my own shapers, because they know how fast we can go.