Scott Paris had recently graduated from Bucknell University with a B.S. degree in business administration and was working as a ski instructor at Aspen Highlands in the Colorado Rockies when his parents came out for a visit.
“That’s when we had the talk,” he recalled. “They wanted to know what I was going to do with my life now that I was out of school.”
At the time, Paris was not exactly sure how to answer that question. But the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of moving to Florida to play golf for a living.
“I had made the team at Bucknell my last two years of college and thought maybe I could play,” Paris said. “So I moved to Florida with a good friend who also wanted to give golf a try as a professional. We didn’t have a job or a place to stay when we left Colorado, but we found both soon after we arrived. We were making something like $5.50 an hour hosing down carts and picking the range at the DeLand Country Club. And we competed mini-tour events whenever we could.”
One can only surmise how unimpressed his mother and father must have been with their son’s decision to trade in his skis for golf clubs, no doubt believing that something more corporate might have made more sense.
But three decades later, Paris is still working in golf. He never made it as a tour player, realizing early on that while he may have been a good player, the vast majority of those doing it for a living are great. But he has excelled as a PGA club professional and today holds one of the biggest jobs in the industry, as director of golf at the Plainfield Country Club in New Jersey as well as its chief operating officer.
His parents may not have been thrilled initially with his decision to move to Florida to play golf all those years ago. “But they are pretty happy with the way things have worked out,” said Paris, who is now 54 years old and, with his wife Rachel, raising three children, a son Jack and twins Kate and Will.
Truth be told, so is he.
Paris grew up in the Connecticut town of Avon, where golf was little more than an athletic afterthought for him. “I was playing every other sport as a kid,” he said. “A lot of baseball. Soccer, too, and I skied all the time. But by the time I was 17 or 18 years old, I started playing golf with my father. It was a way for us to spend time together, and I really enjoyed that.”
Paris kept teeing it up when he went off to Bucknell. “I worked on my game and eventually became good enough to play on the golf team my last two years there,” he said.
It is also what prompted him to go to work in the game when his studies were done.
“It used to be that clubs were run by a sort of four-headed monster with a general manager, chairmen for the golf and greens committees and someone from another important area of the club, like rackets. But more and more, people have been seeing the wisdom of having one COO who can oversee the entire operation.” – Scott Paris
Though Paris did not enjoy much in the way of success as a mini-tour player, he did make some important connections during his first winters in Florida, specifically with noted teaching professionals Mitchell Spearman and Simon Holmes. And they kindled what turned out to be a keen interest in instruction and ultimately a different sort of career in golf, that as a PGA club professional.
Paris had held a succession of assistant jobs in Florida when he applied for a similar position at Aronimink Golf Club in the Philadelphia area. “They hired me, and the head professional, Jim Masserio, took me under his wing and taught me all about being a club professional,” he said. “Around that same time, I also started working for Simon Holmes in Florida in the winters. He ran a golf academy in Orlando and taught tour professionals such as Nick Faldo, Darren Clarke, Bernhard Langer and Suzann Pettersen. Simon helped me a lot with my own game and also with teaching others. I really liked golf instruction. I was fascinated by the drills and the process and how I could help people get better. That was really gratifying.”
Paris stayed at Aronimink until December 1996, at which point he became the head golf professional at Plainfield Country Club, just up the road in Plainfield, New Jersey.
“Like Aronimink, it was a family club with just over 300 members and a world-class golf course, and I was very excited about the opportunity,” he said. “I was also young and taking on my first head job. So I tried to give myself my best chances at success. First, I surrounded myself with a really good team. Secondly, I leaned heavily on my peers in the industry to improve the things I did not do as well as I needed to. And third, I made a habit of talking to our members and asking them how we were doing and about the things we could improve upon.”
Clearly, Paris did a lot of things well at Plainfield, which boasts a highly rated Donald Ross course that Gil Hanse recently restored and has hosted a U.S. Amateur, a U.S. Women’s Open and the Barclays on the PGA Tour. And after nine years, the club – which is also home to a semi-private, nine-hole course that is home to a First Tee chapter – promoted him to director of golf. Then in the fall of 2018, it asked him to take on the additional duties of chief operating officer.
“That role was brought on in many ways by changes that are being made to longtime industry models,” Paris said. “It used to be that clubs were run by a sort of four-headed monster with a general manager, chairmen for the golf and greens committees and someone from another important area of the club, like rackets. But more and more, people have been seeing the wisdom of having one COO who can oversee the entire operation.
“I liked that approach. What I did ask when I assumed that position was to be able to keep playing, with my members and also competitively. That was really important to me.”
So was mentoring. “There were so many people who have influenced me through the years, and because of that, I developed a strong passion for helping up-and-comers,” Paris said. “Fortunately, I am still able to do that as COO and have that opportunity with young golf professionals as well as those aspiring to be a golf course superintendent or even head tennis professionals or general managers.”
It’s a great gig, Paris added, with the only drawback being that he is not able to spend as much time on the lesson tee as he once did.
“I miss that, to be sure,” he said. “But everything else is working out very well.”
He even gets to ski in the winters, and he enjoys taking his family on occasion to some of the same slopes he once frequented.
Before the talk.