ON THE JOB IN HOPEWELL VALLEY
By John Tredrea
Editor’s note: This is the latest in a series of portraits of people at work.
Corey Krusa has been teaching golf full time for 16 of the 36 years of his life.
But his intense involvement with the game began before he was a teenager and his first job literally required him to swing a golf club, over and over again, and hit balls toward a general target area.
"I practically grew up on a golf course," Mr. Krusa said last week. "When I was a boy, we lived close enough to the Pike Brook Country Club in Belle Mead for me to ride my bike to it. I was there all the time. My first job was there, collecting golf balls on the driving range. I was too young to drive a golf cart, so they gave me a club and told me to beat the balls into middle of the range, where the machine could pick them up."
An athletic-looking friendly man who smiles often, Mr. Krusa conveys the impression one would expect from a successful golfer and golf teacher. He’s very focused and quite relaxed, is a careful, respectful listener and is articulate, making his point with as few, carefully chosen, words as possible.
He admits that, when not working, he often prefers to avoid golf courses. But, Mr. Krusa said, "I have begun to spend some time on golf with my son, though, because he’s getting pretty interested in it."
For the past five years, Mr. Krusa has worked at the Pennington Golf Center on Route 31 in central Hopewell Township. As head of the center’s Golf Academy, he gives lessons to individuals and groups, runs golf clinics and oversees a golf camp for youngsters.
"I don’t play competitive golf anymore," he said. "I don’t have time." When not on the job, he likes to spend time at home in Mount Holly with his wife, Jennifer, and their 8-year-old son, Ethan.
From working on the driving range Mr. Krusa went onto caddying and other jobs at Pike Brook. He played varsity golf at Hillsborough Hill School. Shortly after graduation, he was hired as assistant golf pro at the Beaver Brook course in Clinton. He stayed two years.
"I started teaching golf there," he said. "I progressed into it gradually, working with young golfers and helping the head pro at clinics."
From Beaver Brook, Mr. Krusa went to a job at Newton Country Club, where he stayed three years as an assistant pro. "I did a lot more teaching there and ran the clinics and camps for junior golfers," he said. After working at Newton, Mr. Krusa did a long stint at a golf center in Tom’s River, where he supervised four other golf pros, before coming to the Pennington Golf Center. The center was called Somerton Springs before it was taken over five years ago by current owner Rick Lutzow.
Mr. Krusa came on board soon after Mr. Lutzow. Today, the center does a brisk business. It is not unusual to see most of the booths of the driving range filled even when the weather is quite cold.
Mr. Krusa’s involvement with golf has changed considerably, but he still loves it. "I have played the game well. That meant a lot to me, and I really enjoyed it," he said. "What I love most now is helping other people play well. When a former student contacts me to say thanks for the help I gave them with their game, it’s fantastic."
"To be consistent is the name of the game," he said. "My approach to teaching has evolved to always trying to take what the student comes in with and working with that, rather than going all the way back to square one and starting from scratch. I’ve learned that you don’t have to try to force anyone into a mold to help them improve their golf game dramatically."
As an example, he recalled a student who took an eight-week course with him. "She’d been playing golf for many years," Mr. Krusa said. "She wanted to become what we call an 18-hole golfer instead of a nine-hole golfer. Her hitting distance was quite limited. In fact, she only used one or two clubs, because the shot went about the same distance no matter what club she used."
Mr. Krusa said he taught that student "to make slight adjustments to her swing" that were needed because of misconceptions common in novice or struggling golfers. "It was nothing dramatic," he said. "She had been swinging strictly using her arms. I taught her to swing the club around her body to get her whole body into the swing. We doubled her hitting distance."
He said she had fallen into the common error of trying to swing up through the ball. "Many people have a tendency to do that, and it’s very understandable that they would," he said. "But you need to drive down through the ball. That’s why the divot (shallow hole in the turf) you see good golfers make is considerably past the point where the ball was. People think that, if you drive down through the ball, you’ll just drill into the ground. But you won’t. It’s a simple thing, but it always blows everybody away when they first see it clearly."
There are many different shots in the game of golf. Mr. Krusa said the importance of one of them, putting, is easily overlooked among golfers focused on hitting long and straight off the tee or fairway. "Think of it numerically in terms of your score," Mr. Krusa said. "The game is based on two putts per hole. That’s 36 shots on a par-72 course. This means that, if you shoot par, half, or nearly half, of the shots you take are going to be putts. Most people would lower their score if they practiced putting more."
He added: "I can teach you how to putt straight. But I can’t teach you how to putt 30 feet instead of 10 feet. Practice on the putting green is the only thing that can do that for you."
Asked to reflect on what drew him to golf at a young age and has kept him at it so long, both as a livelihood and pastime, Mr. Krusa said: "It’s a challenge. Golf is such a hard game, such a difficult game. It’s you versus the golf course and it’s very competitive in that respect. There’s no such thing as perfect. You can’t shoot an 18 in golf you can’t shoot 18 holes-in-one, it’s impossible. And, as has often been said, it’s a game you can stay with a lifetime and grow with in a lot of other activities, that’s just not possible."