Perfection to a tee

He’s out of breath, and his phone is ringing.

John Coolbaugh is in the middle of another 20-hour day at Congressional Country Club. There’s an incessant beeping noise coming from a truck, which is probably holding portable toilets or scoreboards or merchandise for this week’s AT&T National.

He doesn’t have time to talk now - not with only a week before the tournament starts, not with so much left to do.

Coolbaugh, operations manager for the AT&T National, oversees everything from construction of the pavilions and television towers to the roping and staking of the course to the placement of bathrooms and concession stands. He and his staff started preparing Congressional for the tournament in May, but it wasn’t until last week that seemingly every inch of the course’s 380 acres began bustling with activity.

But Coolbaugh and his operations staff are only one cog in the machine that preps Bethesda’s historic country club for the PGA Tour event that begins Thursday.

There’s also Mike Giuffre, the club’s director of golf maintenance who primed Congressional’s pristine grounds for Tiger Woods and the rest of the 120 PGA Tour golfers arriving this week. And there’s Steve Rintoul, the PGA Tour’s tournament official who set up the course from a competition standpoint and assured the players that everything from their meals in the clubhouse to their walk toward the first tee would be seamless.

“This is a bad thing to say, but I like to say that you’ve got to keep your eyes on the circus before the clowns get to town,” Rintoul says. “When the players arrive on-site, they’re so used to everything being ready. It’s just click, click, click - from transportation to the locker room [to] the player dining.”

The grandstands and corporate skyboxes began going up in May.

Click.

On June 22, a truckload of portable bathrooms from Don’s Johns arrived and were placed adjacent to the fifth green.

Click.

In the days that followed, TV towers, concession stands and scoreboards went up while mowers, trimmers and rollers hummed in the background.

Click.

“I don’t feel the pressure,” Coolbaugh says. “For me, it’s more excitement… especially in the month or two leading up to the tournament.”

Sculpting the course

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