Chris Reverie never envisioned a career in public golf. Yet, seven years after becoming the superintendent at Allentown Municipal Golf Course in Pennsylvania, he can hardly imagine being anywhere else.
"I spent time interning at Merion for Matt Shaffer. My goal was to return to one of the clubs in Philadelphia," Reverie said.
"Munis are important to the future of golf; they need to be highlighted more than they are."
Whether it is at a private club in Philadelphia, or a city-owned course out in the state that helps grow the game at the grassroots level, Reverie's objective as an agronomist is unchanged.
"My goal is to provide our members and daily fee players with the best conditions possible," he said.
In those seven years, he has led a revival transitioning Allentown Golf Course from a non-descript daily fee facility into a course where conditions rival those of the big name clubs he once coveted.
"When Chris came on board the Course was in OK condition," said Rick Holtzman, superintendent of parks in Allentown. "Chris has brought an energetic culture to the Allentown Municipal Greens Department.
That's not always easy at a place that lacks the same resources found at those private clubs in Philly. And it is even more challenging during a year like 2020 when a pandemic resulted in a labor shortage just before golfers - with nothing else to do - descended on the course in droves, and a tropical storm flooded the course in mid-summer.
"We did 42,000 rounds last year," he said. "That is a lot of golf."
In the early stages of the pandemic, Allentown was closed for eight weeks. Reverie worked alongside city officials to develop a plan and series of protocols to safely open the golf course. In the meantime, with no golf, a spending freeze imposed by the city eliminated his part-time seasonal help, leaving just a skeleton crew in place.
"We had to develop a plan on how to reopen the golf course whenever we got the word from the city," he said. "Instead of mowing the greens, I just topdressed them. Whenever it looked like they needed to be mowed, I topdressed again and again."
Questions arose, like whether there would be a summer crew at all, and what those Covid protocols might look like.
When he was told he would not be able to hire a seasonal summer crew, Reverie convinced the city to put some of that money to just two full-time positions.
"When we opened May 1, we were wondering how we were going to make this work," Reverie said. "I was able to convince the city that instead of hiring a bunch of part-time crew to let me hire two full-time workers. That was the happiest day ever when I told my mechanic we had two more people coming in the next day."
Throughout the pandemic, Allentown has limited players to one rider per cart.
"That was more traffic on the golf course than I had ever seen before," he said. "You'd be surprised at the traffic even from pull carts."
Tropical Storm Isaias arrived in Allentown the first week of August, and the flooding rains it brought closed the course for three day.
Between the pandemic, the resulting labor crunch, the flood of golfers and the flood brought on by Isaias, 2020 became a time to prioritize tasks on the golf course.
"We had to realize and accept that in 2020 there were things that we were going to have to let go," Reverie said. "The detail work was just not going to be there."
