After more than 30 years of directing professional golf tournaments and rubbing shoulders with the world’s top players, Judy McDermott answers surprisingly when asked about the highlights of her long tenure.
It’s not about time spent with World Golf Hall of Famers Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Amy Alcott or Hollis Stacy. For McDermott, 59, it’s about young lives changed by golf that made all of her hours, procedural paperwork, countless meetings and professional networking worth every second of three decades of administrative direction.
“Honestly, it’s about the kids,” said McDermott, now executive director of The First Tee of Tucson in Arizona. “It’s about helping kids understand that if they stay part of a program and don’t give up, they’re going to get more out of this than just golf.”
In a sense, McDermott speaks from personal experience. Growing up in the Los Angeles suburb of Whittier, the daughter of a police officer and schoolteacher learned to play golf as a young girl on public courses.
Her father would take her to LPGA tournaments in Southern California, and every year, they made the trip to Mission Hills Country Club for the LPGA’s Dinah Shore tournament.
But by the sixth grade, McDermott had developed a bit of a “temper at times,” and her father advised her that if she couldn’t behave on the golf course that she should “find something else to do.” She took up softball.
“I learned how to mind my manners and straighten up, and then I went back to golf,” she said.
McDermott eventually earned a walk-on spot on the UCLA women’s golf team, graduating in 1987 with a degree in economics. She never wanted to play on tour or teach golf. Active in student government and with the UCLA Alumni Association, she figured she would become a stock broker.
During her collegiate years, she had worked with UCLA’s central ticket office and gained valuable experience in event ticketing. That helped her land a tournament coordinator internship at an LPGA tournament in Los Angeles, which led to another L.A.-based LPGA tournament, where she was hired to run the event.
A professional contact who worked with the LPGA’s Tucson tournament later reached out to McDermott and told her about an opening to run the PGA Tour’s Tucson Open. McDermott made the trip to Tucson in 1992 and “interviewed reluctantly” for the position. She really did not want to leave California and turned down the offer to become the Tucson Open’s director of marketing.
But Tucson’s Conquistadors, a civic organization that operated the tournament and promoted Tucson tourism, didn’t shut the door on negotiations. They invited her to come to the Tucson Open during tournament week to observe the event.
“I saw that they were all about giving money to local charity and how amazing the community was,” said McDermott, who changed her mind, took the job and moved to Tucson in April 1992.
Once again, things fell into place and she transitioned from her role as marketing director to tournament director in 1994. McDermott was becoming recognized as an industry leader in golf and was one of only three women serving as a PGA Tour tournament director at that time.
She oversaw the World Golf Championships-Accenture Match Play in nearby Marana for eight years. When that contract ended, she brought the PGA Tour Champions event to Tucson in 2015, currently operated as the Cologuard Classic.
“I never thought about it,” she said. “Any time I went to a meeting, Conquistador Russ Perlich was by my side. He was our PGA Tour liaison and a great mentor to me here in Tucson. I always got great support.”
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As McDermott worked tirelessly to solidify sponsorship for the PGA Tour event that she oversaw, she also was working to create a junior golf academy in Tucson. That effort morphed into bringing a First Tee program to town in 2006.
It was an eye opener for McDermott, who immediately felt a tremendous amount of passion for the program designed to help guide kids in life through golf.
“Running tournaments is tough, and I wasn’t getting any younger,” she said. “I felt like I needed to pass that torch to someone else. Once we secured Cologuard as our title sponsor, it was good timing for me to move on. I wanted to run our First Tee program full time and give it the love it deserved.”
McDermott became Tucson’s First Tee executive director in October 2020. The program now has 10 locations with 942 kids in its regular First Tee program and another 200 juniors who play in the First Tee’s tournament program, offering two-day tournaments for ages 6-18. (Younger juniors play nine-hole rounds, and teenagers play 18-hole rounds.)
The program also established a partnership with the City of Tucson, operating out of El Rio Golf Course, a municipal course that the First Tee helped completely renovate. The First Tee also built three par-3 holes on the driving range, accessible to the public.
But while the numbers and city relationships were solid, McDermott discovered her greatest satisfaction was how the program individually impacted so many youths. One of those was a young man named James Labukas.
“James has been with us since he was very young, and he’s had a really hard life,” McDermott said. “For a while, his mother had a drug and alcohol problem and she was in and out of jail for years while he was in our program.”
Instead of becoming a sad statistic, Labukas seized his opportunities with the program. Last year, he was one of two First Tee juniors selected by the national office to travel to Pebble Beach to compete for the Pro-Junior Team title at the PGA Champions Tour’s Pure Insurance Championship.
Meanwhile, McDermott worked with Tucson Country Club to re-energize its caddie program, and Labukas jumped at that opportunity, taking a city bus to the course to carry bags for members on the weekends and during school holidays. Even with the course closed during the blazing hot summers, he managed to log 100 loops at the private club.
That effort caught the attention of organizers of the Western Golf Association’s Chick Evans Scholarship program, which provides full college tuition and housing for high-achieving caddies with limited financial means. Labukas already has been accepted at several universities, but is waiting to hear from Northwestern University, where he wants to study mechanical engineering.
“He had to grow up fast and is wise beyond his years,” McDermott said. “He’s had to work hard, but I know he will be a success wherever he goes. I’m really proud of him.”
“I want all the kids at The First Tee to know that anything is possible. Everything we bring to them is more than just learning how to play golf.” — Judy McDermott
In addition, McDermott has worked with members of The Gallery Golf Club outside Tucson to start its own college scholarship program. First Tee graduate Olivia Munoz recently was awarded the club’s first college scholarship to attend the University of Arizona.
And while youngsters such as Labukas and Munoz have set credible examples for their First Tee peers to follow, McDermott also has been inspired as a golf-industry veteran by watching the fundamentals of success defined in so many ways by kids.
“I want all the kids at The First Tee to know that anything is possible,” she said. “Everything we bring to them is more than just learning how to play golf. It’s about staying in school, pursuing goals, building relationships and understanding what relationships are and what networking is. It’s also about being a part of your community and giving back to the community.”
McDermott’s Tucson First Tee alumni have embraced that concept. Many of them regularly return to help coach the younger participants and to help run summer tournaments. Last year, McDermott played on an all-women’s pro-am team at the Cologuard Classic and girls from The First Tee program served as their caddies.
Her long-time presence in Arizona golf earned McDermott entry into the Arizona Golf Hall of Fame last year. Among her numerous honors, she is also a member of the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame, was the 2017 Women of Influence Nonprofit Champion Award winner, and was named as one of Tucson’s 100 Top Sports Figures by the Arizona Daily Star in 2022.
In addition, she serves on the board of Arizona Alliance for Golf – a group seeking sustainable solutions for water consumption by golf courses in the desert – as well as on the board for Act One, which helps connect students attending Title I (federally aided) schools with cultural arts, such as the Tucson Symphony.
McDermott plans to work “another two years” and pass the torch once again to someone else to run Tucson’s First Tee program. Conceding that she’s “not good at taking a real vacation,” she hopes to someday play golf in Ireland and Scotland.
But most of all, she can’t wait to see what her First Tee graduates become with the lessons the program has taught them.
“I do believe that what you learn on the golf course helps you in life and in your career,” she said. “Golf truly is a game of a lifetime, and it’s been a gift to work with all different kinds of people over the years.”