Mitchell Eickhoff, the GCSAA Class A superintendent at Otter Creek Golf Course in Columbus, Ind., is the 2027 winner of GCSAA’s Emerging Leader Award. Photo by Marc Lebryk
A longtime golfer whose first job was as a cart runner at his hometown golf course, Mitchell Eickhoff didn’t give a second thought to how the course was maintained until he was nearly out of college.
Once he got a taste of it, he was hooked.
“It’s funny — I was a cart boy at Evansville Country Club at 15,” says Eickhoff, a native Hoosier who has served as the GCSAA Class A superintendent at Otter Creek Golf Course in Columbus, Ind., since 2021. “I didn’t recognize this as a profession. I didn’t even know golf course maintenance was a thing. I didn’t know it was an option coming out of high school. After I was introduced to the industry, it was just something I fell in love with.”
Apparently, the feeling is mutual.
Eickhoff, a 12-year association member, is the 2027 winner of GCSAA’s Emerging Leader Award, which is presented in partnership with John Deere to recognize “an individual who serves the industry as a superintendent with less than five years’ experience, student, associate member or assistant who displays continuous growth in service and leadership.”
That description, his boss and longtime friend says, fits Eickhoff perfectly.
“Mitch is the locomotive of this team,” says Brent Downs, CGCS, MG, director of agronomy at Otter Creek GC and nearby Harrison Lake Country Club and 19-year GCSAA member. “As he goes, they go. They’d follow him anywhere. He can do any job on the course, and the team responds to that. He’s passionate. He’s not a big rah-rah guy, but he leads by example, and he’s a great coach. I think the goal of every leader is, if the teacher does the job right, the student surpasses the leader, and that’s what Mitch has done here.”
Eickhoff (left) and architect Erik Belgum. Photo courtesy of Mitchell Eickhoff
‘This isn’t for me’
Golf course maintenance wasn’t on Eickhoff’s radar when he left hometown Evansville, Ind., for Purdue. Eickhoff, who always “did good” at math and science, was three years into his pursuit of a degree in chemical engineering when longtime friend Phil Fischer mentioned acclaimed Victoria National Golf Club in Newburgh, Ind., was in need of summer laborers.
“So I went out and did that,” Eickhoff recalls. “Matt Weitz (now GCSAA director of agronomy at Vaquero Club in Westlake, Texas, and 21-year association member) was the director at the time, one of my very important mentors. He treated me like an intern that first summer I worked for him. I went back and did another year at Purdue and said, ‘This isn’t for me.’ I wouldn’t say I was an A-plus student, but I made the decision I wasn’t going to finish that degree.”
Good call, says Fischer, now the GCSAA Class A senior grounds manager at Brickyard Crossing Golf Course in Indianapolis and 18-year association member.
“I knew his family, and I knew his work ethic,” Fischer says. “I knew he’d be good when I hired him.”
When he says he knows him, that’s not a stretch. Though separated by two years, they attended the same schools from elementary to college.
“It’s not like we hung out, but I ran around with his cousins, and we went to the same schools,” says Fischer, the older of the two. “Unlike him, I did go to Purdue to study turfgrass science. He was the nerd studying chemical engineering. Mitch didn’t see the greatness of the industry until after school.”
But given Eickhoff’s golfing history, Fischer had a hunch.
“I knew he had a passion for golf, so I thought he’d be good at this,” Fischer says. “When I hired him, I needed someone to do grunt labor with me, and I knew he’d be a good employee. I knew he’d care. But I didn’t imagine he’d get a career in turfgrass.
“Like all first jobs, you don’t come into the turf industry and you’re an instant leader. But he picked it up quicker than most guys and girls. He was trainable, and he wasn’t afraid to get dirty. Not everybody is that way. We worked a lot of stupid hours back in the day, and Mitch wasn’t afraid to do that. He fit in well with the crew and the culture. I thought he had big promise, and it’s been fun watching him grow.”
The management crew at Otter Creek Golf course, from left: Tony Wilks, Jarrett Price, Eickhoff, Brent Downs, Tim Martin and Alex Johnson. Photo by Marc Lebryk
Off to Augusta
After renouncing his pursuit of a degree in chemical engineering, Eickhoff switched gears and received certification through Rutgers’ two-year turfgrass program. He also eventually secured a bachelor’s in business from Purdue University Global.
He landed an internship at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga., after discussing it with Downs, his current boss and former co-worker at Victoria National. Downs was an assistant at Victoria National who previously was a turf grad at Augusta National.
“He was part of the reason I got the job at Augusta,” Eickhoff says of Downs. “That’s how I got my name in the door.”
That internship led to a full-time gig at the ultra-exclusive club as an assistant-in-training.
“It was definitely a very unique experience,” Eickhoff says of his eight years, 2013-2021, at Augusta. I learned a lot.”
Brad Owen, the longest-tenured superintendent in Augusta National GC history, remembers young Eickhoff.
“I always held Mitch in high esteem and saw much growth and development while he was with us,” says Owen, a 41-year association member who, after 38 years at Augusta (including 27 as its director of golf course maintenance), moved on to join golf course consultancy firm Turfgrass in October 2024. “(He was) always steady under pressure.”
Otter Creek comes calling
That steadiness made him an easy target when Downs was looking for a superintendent for Otter Creek GC. Downs had been promoted to director of agronomy at Otter Creek and Harrison Lake, and he was looking to hire his replacement at Otter Creek.
“There was only one name on my list, and it was Mitch,” Downs says.
His name was on more than one list. Fischer, too, tried to recruit Eickhoff to join the staff at Brickyard Crossing, a facility partially routed through the infield at famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Otter Creek won out.
“Brent called me up and said, ‘Do you want to become superintendent here,’ and the rest is history,” says the 37-year-old Eickhoff, who with wife, Mallory, has two children, 9-year-old Scott and 6-year-old Claire.
Downs recalls Eickhoff was very much a first-time superintendent then.
“At first, he wanted to do everything,” Downs says. “There’s a time and place for that, but he’s learned to delegate. The other thing is leading up. He has a director. I have two courses to oversee. Now he knows when to come to me and when not to come to me. That’s been Mitch’s biggest evolution, learning to trust himself. I trust him. Even if he’s wrong, I’ll back him 100%. Failure is part of the process. But he knows when he needs another set of eyes and when he doesn’t.”
Checking in on the Otter Creek renovation, from left: Michael Schulte, Eickhoff, owner Bob Haddad and James Pedersen. Photos courtesy of Mitchell Eickhoff
A turning point, Downs says, came when the two took a Dale Carnegie professional development course together.
“He wasn’t thrilled about it,” Downs says with a laugh. “I was looking for other ways to grow. I love the turf bubble, but sometimes you need to get out of it. I was looking for other ways to grow my soft skills. I thought it would be nice to do it the first time with somebody I know and trust, so I asked Mitch. He gave me an eye roll. I said, ‘Let’s just try it and see how it goes.’ He was like, ‘OK, I’ll support you.’ I thought it was just a public-speaking course, but we both realized it was a connections class — how to talk to people, how to read people.”
In the fourth week of the class, the attendees were to give a how-to talk. Eickhoff decided to teach the class how to hit a flop shot — and absolutely owned the room.
“I’ll always remember, when Mitch walked to the front of that room, that was a side of him I’d never seen before,” Downs says. “He was assertive. Usually, he’d just sit and listen. But that speech he gave … he was confident, assertive. He won the award for breakthrough performance that week. I told him, ‘Whoever that guy was, you bring him to work every day,’ and from that day on, he was a different man.”
Eickhoff agrees.
“In my beginning stages as a superintendent, I just put my head down and worked,” Eickhoff says. “I’d sit in the back and not say much. But going through that Dale Carnegie course gave me the confidence that I was the expert on the course, that my thoughts and reasoning made sense.”
Killin’ the reno
Nowhere has that confidence been more evident, Downs says, than in Eickhoff’s handling of Otter Creek’s in-progress renovation.
“Mitch is the locomotive behind all that,” Downs says.
It’s no “gentle reimagining,” as some golf course renos are. This one is massive in scope, a soup-to-nuts, strip-it-down-and-start-from-scratch rebuild of what was a Robert Trent Jones Sr. design.
The renovation, which started the breaking-dirt phase last year, will change what was a 27-hole facility into a 43-holer — an upgrade of the original 18, plus two new par-3s: a 12-hole pitch and putt and a 13-hole executive course.
“It’s a complete revamp, blowing everything up,” Eickhoff says. “We’re upgrading to better bents, better rough, a complete teardown, bunkers moving, new greens complexes. It’s a massive project, and I’m fortunate my owner wants to do something like this. We had a 25-year-old irrigation system. We still had old Penncross fairways and greens. Our roughs were a mix of … whatever. It was a good course, but we had pretty much tapped out on what we could do. The owner could have said, ‘Let’s just fix the irrigation system.’ But he had a vision. He wanted a golf course you could play from cradle to grave, and I’m fortunate to be a part of it.”
The Eickhoffs, from left: Claire, Mallory, Mitchell and Scott.
Construction is scheduled to be complete late this year, with a full reopening not until 2028.
Though neither Eickhoff nor Downs had been a part of a full-scale renovation like this before, they had experience in various aspects of it. They learned through courses at the GCSAA Conference and Trade Show and visited with peers who have reno experience.
“We called up Matt Weitz. He had a whole book about what he went through,” Eickhoff says. “That helped us out tremendously. We prepared as much as we could, but a lot of it you just learn along the way. Honestly, I feel very blessed to be a part of this. Not everybody gets to be a part of a project this big. People ask, ‘What do you want to be doing in five, 10 years,’ and, honestly, I don’t have an answer. This might be it.”
Downs, for his part, would love to have Eickhoff stick around.
“To tell you the truth, Mitch has been so huge, this place could probably withstand the loss of me more than the loss of Mitch,” Downs says. “Mitch is one of the good guys. He’s not a spotlight guy. But maybe that’s why he’s a guy who should have the spotlight on him. The way the team responds to him is so rare. That respect, the class … it’s hard to define. The way the team looks at him when he talks to them means so much. I’m so proud of him. He deserves everything he’s getting.”
Eickhoff will officially receive his Emerging Leader Award at the 2027 GCSAA Conference and Trade Show in New Orleans.
Andrew Hartsock (ahartsock@gcsaa.org) is a GCM staff member.