King Supers

With every cross-cut fairway and smoothly rolled green, brothers Kevin, Dave and Craig Cahalane extend the legacy of their father

By Jon Rizzi

At an average elevation of roughly 8,300 feet above sea level, the Colorado golf courses at Bear Dance in Larkspur, Pole Creek in Tabernash and Telluride in the Mountain Village consistently earn high marks for their striking natural beauty, eminent playability and—most impressively, given the capricious high-altitude weather—superb conditioning.

The last attribute results from another common denominator: All three mountain facilities have a head superintendent named Cahalane.

Brothers Kevin, Dave and Craig Cahalane grew up in Littleton and came by their craft naturally. When their father, Rollie, wasn’t coaching their sports teams, officiating college basketball games or skiing with the boys and their mother, Carol, he was earning a reputation as an elite superintendent, primarily at Columbine Country Club and Inverness Golf Club.

He didn’t have to look far for assistance. Jeffco School District’s year-round Concept Six schedule made Kevin and Dave—the oldest and middle sons—available to work for their dad when other teenagers were in class.

“We filled a niche for him in August and September,” says the second-born, Dave, who has supervised the grounds at Bear Dance since before it opened in 2002.

“He didn’t push us into working at golf courses,” remembers Dave’s older brother Kevin, who oversees Telluride Ski and Golf Club, where he has worked since its 1992 debut. “But since he had openings, the best thing to do was to work for him.”

Both brothers enjoyed learning the trade from their dad, a Marine veteran. He was fair but harder on them than on other employees.

“As his sons, we were supposed to be setting examples,” Dave says, before admitting that his father fired him three different times for “being tardy.”

Craig remembers his brothers—who are, respectively, 11 and nine years older than him—discouraged him from joining the grounds crew. Instead, he worked in the cart barn at Inverness.

Sure enough, the first time Craig helped on a course, in 1993, he got scolded. “It was at Telluride, and Kevin, Dave and I were onsite. I was edging bunkers with the crew, and Kevin, who was the super and looks a lot like our dad, starts barking, ‘Do I need to come over there and show you how to use that shovel?’”

Craig laughs at the memory. He loved the work and dove in. Dave, who’d become the assistant superintendent at Tamarron (now Glacier Club) in Durango, took his younger brother under his wing, and trained him in all things agronomic. “I dove in,” he says. “I loved having the golf course as my office.”

After working courses in Gypsum and Westminster, in 2006 Craig got the top job at Pole Creek. His boss, general manager Larry Burks, was a high-school friend of Dave’s with whom Rollie had a fatherly relationship. Burks saw in Craig the same work ethic and outlook that Rollie had. “Even when something bad was going on, Rollie’s attitude stayed positive,” Burks recalls. “He’d always say, ‘Things are going to work out.’”

Things had started working out for Rollie in 1967. While he was trying to follow in his father’s footsteps by getting an accounting degree at the University of Wyoming, he found more satisfaction from his part-time course maintenance job at Cheyenne Country Club. By 1972, he’d relocated the family to Colorado, where he helped construct Arrowhead Golf Course in Roxborough Park and became its first superintendent. He eventually came into his own as the superintendent at Columbine in 1976. He prepped the course for two LPGA championships, became president of the Rocky Mountain Superintendents Association (RMGCSA) and watched both Kevin and Dave advance through the cart barn and caddie ranks to the grounds crew.

They were also there for many of Rollie’s 21 years at Inverness, which hosted six Colorado Opens, multiple PGA Section Championships and three John Elway Celebrity Classics. In 1988, the RMGCSA named him its “Turfgrass Man of the Year.”

“As a golf superintendent, Rollie focused on how the course was playing, not its aesthetics,” remembers retired superintendent John Hoofnagle, who worked near Inverness at Meridian—and hired Kevin for his crew one summer.

“Think as a player, not as an observer,” Joel Christensen, one of Rollie’s many protégés and his successor at Inverness, recalls his boss advising. “You can play on a dry course; you can’t play on a soggy one.”

That player-friendly philosophy endeared him to Tony Novitsky and Tom Babb, the late PGA Professionals, respectively, at Columbine and Inverness, and their assistant professionals.

“My experience with Rollie spoiled me,” says Ken Krieger, who worked for Babb before spending more than three decades as Cheyenne Country Club’s head professional. “Rollie made his job seem great, and I thought all superintendents were like that, but they’re not.”

When Krieger qualified for the 1993 PGA Championship at Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio, Rollie caddied for him.  

The only bag you’ll see the current generation of Cahalane superintendents carry on the golf course might contain a divot mix, but, as Kevin says, “What I try to carry on is my father’s ability of getting along great with everyone—the pros, the staff, and especially our crew, mowing, cutting cups, helping on irrigation. Leading by example.”

Although Rollie set an example for his sons, neither he nor his wife, Carol, actively encouraged them to follow in their father’s footsteps. All three brothers received degrees in business administration from Fort Lewis College in Durango and had initially planned to apply that knowledge to something other than controlling expenses on a course maintenance spreadsheet.

“They all saw their dad working eight days a week, so it was a total surprise they chose to get into the business,” their mother Carol says.

Rollie gently tried to dissuade his sons from the pressure-filled superintendent’s life. And after hearing their war stories of ice damage and winterkill, elk and moose destruction, busted irrigation lines, labor shortages, the ravages of post-pandemic cart traffic, elevated expectations attached to rising green fees, and other stressors that come with the job, you can understand his concern.

“But you go with what you know best,” Dave says. “When you get to work and the sun’s coming up, the mountain lions are leaving and the birds are singing, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

“Dad thought we were crazy to get into this line of work,” Craig says. “But man, you could tell, he was so proud of us.”

He had every reason to be. Before he died in 2012, Rollie had seen all three of his sons become head superintendents, husbands and fathers, and he watched Dave get elected president of the RMGCSA. Sadly, he didn’t live to see Craig also serve as RMCGSA president, Dave’s two daughters—one, an Evans Scholar—get married, or Kevin’s daughter graduate from high school.

None of the three daughters want to ply the family trade. That leaves Craig’s 13-year-old son Fletcher—who still plays a Friday 9-hole game with his grandmother on the same course his father maintains—as the sole candidate to extend the legacy. “He jokes about becoming a superintendent,” Craig says, “and I say ‘Hell no.’”

Just as his dad might have said to him. And look how that turned out.