If Kristen LaCount had had her druthers, she’d never have entered what can accurately be called the “family business.” She’d be putting her Johnson & Wales culinary degree to use running her own restaurant and starring as a spitfire celebrity chef in some Food Network show by now.
Instead, LaCount’s front of the house at one of America’s most storied clubs – which hosted the 2022 U.S. Open. LaCount is the fourth generation in her family to work at the club (her parents actually met while working there), but she’s the first woman to lead as general manager and COO in the 140-year history of The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. That puts the 42-year-old in exclusive company of female leaders at some of America’s most prominent clubs along with Paula (Frechette) Kelly, the general manager and COO at Merion Golf Club, and Kimberly Clark Warren, the GM/COO at Saucon Valley.
It’s a job LaCount seems born to.
“My story is unique in itself, I think,” LaCount said. “There are a number of female GM/COOs – obviously not even close to a percentage that makes up one worth noting. I think the world is moving towards more female leadership anyway. Hopefully it gives everyone an opportunity, not just women, but kind of lets them see that it’s possible.”
LaCount’s mother grew up across the street from the club – about a block behind TCC legend Francis Ouimet’s home – and worked weekends at the front desk throughout college. That’s where she met Kristen’s father, Steve, who started at the club as a dishwasher before working his way up to become TCC’s youngest executive chef, a position he held for decades before leaving to run his own restaurant. Before them, LaCount’s grandmother worked in the club’s business office and her great grandmother worked there as well. So did many of her uncles, aunts, cousins and little sister.
“I always knew the club was a special place, but if anything I was fighting against being the lifer.” – Kristen LaCount
Naturally, LaCount and her sister pretty much grew up on the club’s campus, sitting on milk crates eating peppermint stick ice cream on the loading dock while they waited for their dad to get off work. Kristen started working at the club as a high school teenager in the snack bar.
“I have this lens of being a local resident but also knowing what it’s like on the inside of the club,” she said.
LaCount, however, will admit this was not her dream job growing up. The club was frankly the last place she wanted to spend her whole life. Someone who asks Santa for a set of kitchen knives as a young teen isn’t eying a career balancing the needs of the golf, tennis, swimming, curling and shooting members on a campus that includes 13 historic buildings and 20 membership programs.
“I always knew the club was a special place, but if anything I was fighting against being the lifer,” LaCount said.
Dreams change, however. As she was approaching graduation from Johnson & Wales University in 2003, LaCount had a culinary job lined up to be the number two chef at a restaurant in Connecticut. But as the post-9/11 economy struggled, investors pulled the plug on the project. LaCount’s best laid plans were shattered.
“That broke me,” said LaCount, who holds a hospitality business degree. “I’m a pretty tight check-off list kind of individual, even more so back then, and to get a phone call weeks away from graduation that I wasn’t going to get the job that I was planning on going into was a little jolting for a 22-year-old who hadn’t had her ducks in a row.”
Desperate for a plan B to pay her bills, her father suggested she ask advice of his boss, David Chag, the long-time general manager at TCC. Having known Kristen and the LaCounts for years, Chag had a novel suggestion.
“David half made a joke and just said, ‘You know you have the personality and we can teach you a few things here from a more formal environment, if you’re willing to learn. We’ll see what happens,’” LaCount said. “And so that was the beginning of a trust that existed between David and I for many, many years later.”
LaCount spent the next four years soaking in all the facets of club management that a large club with a diverse campus like Brookline has to offer. A one-year stint at a desk job in communications exposed her to every aspect of TCC. She had an aptitude and an appetite for her unplanned career path, and the variety that TCC offered pushed, challenged and satisfied her craving to learn more.
“She has an incredible work ethic and enthusiasm and personality that’s infectious, so others tend to want to work with her,” Chag told the Brookline Tab. “People enjoy being around her.”
By 2007 – while her husband, Dan Kerrigan, and father were both living her original dream of running their own restaurants – LaCount was immersed in club management. The place she was once so keen to move on from was now literally her back yard. She lived with her husband and two young kids (7 and 5) in the manager’s house – right in the middle of the golf course on holes 7, 8 and 9 of the Main course – where her mom used to babysit back in the 1970s.
In 2013, when TCC hosted the U.S. Amateur championship, she was promoted to be the club’s first assistant general manager and hand-picked successor to eventually replace Chag. The “A” in her title changed to acting GM until the pandemic – LaCount picked up the reins on Oct. 1, 2020, as general manager/chief operating officer for one of the USGA’s charter clubs as it prepared for its return to the major championship stage.
“She just struck us that she was the best person for the job, so much so that we decided not to do a search, but just to directly hire her,” TCC president Lyman Bullard told Wicked Local.
LaCount has the requisite ammunition license (for the skeet shooting) and knows her way around curling and other programs TCC offers. But it’s the golf she’s picked up most through the years, as the events the club hosted including Massachusetts State Amateurs were always her favorites. As a little girl she did not attend the 1988 U.S. Open won by Curtis Strange at Brookline (though there is a picture at the club of her grandmother gathering autographs), but LaCount came home from college to work four days during the 1999 Ryder Cup and was awed by the scale of it and the emotions of the invested staff after the champagne showers ended.
It was the 2013 U.S. Amateur, however, that she calls her “lightbulb moment,” confirming to her that she wanted to work at a club that hosted major tournaments.
“What it did for bringing the membership and staff together – the electricity that it brought to the property – it was a magical week,” she said.
That magic built up for the 122nd U.S. Open, the biggest event in the club’s storied history of big events, which include 12 previous USGA championships and a Ryder Cup – which is saying something considering the 1913 U.S. Open won by Ouimet still resonates and the 1999 match still sparks intense feelings and debate.
“You’re married, and it is truly a partnership (with the USGA) in every sense of the word. It’s not our staff necessarily putting up the 2x4s or drawing up the sitemap, but it is a dialogue.” – Kristen LaCount
Major championships have grown exponentially in scale in the 34 years since TCC last hosted a U.S. Open, and LaCount has been in the middle of it liaising with the USGA, club members and the community in her tireless and focused fashion. The 1,300 club members – most of whom she not only knows by name but can recall favorite ice cream flavors – bought into what the 2022 U.S. Open and the club’s role in hosting it for the fourth time meant. They aimed to feel proud of what they presented after Matt Fitzpatrick was crowned champion in the shadow of its famous yellow clubhouse.
“Our membership has apparently broken a couple records,” she said before the U.S. Open. “Our members have made up for about a third of the needed volunteers. Member support has been about 94 percent across the board, whether it’s purchasing tickets, corporate sales or volunteering, which to us speaks volumes about the support that this membership has for hosting these events.”
In 1988, the club was in charge of everything including infrastructure. Now the USGA handles most of the buildout and has had its own boots on the ground at TCC for years preparing in conjunction with the club.
“You’re married, and it is truly a partnership (with the USGA) in every sense of the word,” she said. “It’s not our staff necessarily putting up the 2x4s or drawing up the sitemap, but it is a dialogue.
“That has definitely been a learning curve and a little education point. … Part of our job for the last five or more years has been making sure that people understand the magnitude and try to bring back to them this is impactful. But it’s not over on the last day that the putt drops. You also have to then dismantle and put your club back together.”
The USGA, for its part, listens. LaCount said it was actually a member who made the suggestion for switching the routing of the composite course that was used for the first time at that year’s U.S. Open, and the result was a better flow across the property for players and fans.
LaCount is the conduit for coordination and communication of all vested parties – and her lifetime being part of the Brookline community pays dividends on that front.
“For me it’s always kind of anticipating how this is going to impact the folks around here,” she said. “We’re here forever. It’s for Brookline, the membership and for sure the staff as well so that people have an idea of what’s going on and what to expect. To be relatable to a neighborhood, those are the folks that are going to be impacted in a big way by the championship. And just being able to at least tell them, ‘Hey, my mom grew up across the street,’ people can say, ‘Oh, she’s a local; she understands.’”
With everything now set to present the Gil Hanse-renovated Brookline to a 21st Century audience, LaCount has been looking beyond the U.S. Open.
“I’ve been thinking about the post-championship period and what that might look like for us,” she said, citing ongoing capital improvements that include renovating the historic clubhouse for the first time since 1994 to mesh with recently completed work on its stables and locker buildings.
“This club does not stand still; there’s always something,” she said.
“I think the club, with the 2013 Amateur and now the 2022 Open, is making a statement. We will be going back to calling our championship course the Open Course.” – Kristen LaCount
After the U.S. Open left, LaCount has been managing a changing landscape for employees seeking better work/life balance while keeping the club relevant in the everyday lives of its membership.
“Programs might always ebb and flow depending on what is popular, and we’re thinking about creative ideas with people working more remotely and families having a lot more flexibility: how do we keep them coming to the club as kind of the one place that has everything they need?” she said. “I take that pretty seriously as a responsibility to make sure that I maintain that culture for our employees to carry that through in the future and not lose what TCC’s magic is all about.”
And LaCount is determined that magic will include more major events in Brookline’s near future. It takes seriously its role as one of five charter USGA member clubs going back to 1894, having first played host to the U.S. Women’s Amateur championship in 1902. Sustaining those histories and traditions is critical to TCC’s mission.
“I think the club, with the 2013 Amateur and now the 2022 Open, is making a statement,” she said. “We have gone back to calling our championship course the Open Course. The club is serious about its partnership with the USGA and hopes that that is where we host championships. What those will be, I don’t know. But I think that it’s inevitable.”
Sounds a little bit like her own story that continues where it began at The Country Club.