Teaching Staff Bio

The following article was printed in both the Syracuse Post Standard and the LPGA News Links Magazine.

On a busy summer day at Hillendale Golf Course, Mary Novickas gives instructions to the grounds crew before showing two men in the pro shop the proper way to swing a club. Two rooms away, Darlene Sommer is on the phone haggling over their food order for the club's July 4th barbecue. She also watches carefully as workers prepare for a banquet that evening. Novickas points the soda delivery man in the right direction before she sits down to help Sommer.

Novickas and Sommer are the heart and soul of Hillendale. They unclog sinks, grill the ribs at the annual barbecue, treat the greens, and tend bar. They even tore up the earth and built the back nine holes on the Ithaca course. Their odd jobs wouldn't seem unusual except Novickas owns the course and Sommer is the head golf professional. Novickas employs 17 workers, but there's no job she hasn't done.

Novickas and Sommer are a minority, both as women in the industry and do-it-all pros. Though the trend among younger pros is moving toward doing it all, traditional golf pros look down on those who don't stick to giving lessons and selling equipment. Not these LPGA teaching professionals. "I don't believe there is anything we can't do," Sommer said.

Their energy and creativity has revived Hillendale, once regarded by golfers as a cow pasture, and made it the most popular golf course in Tompkins County for the past five years, according to a readers poll by The Ithaca Journal .

The oppposite strenghts of the two friends blend together to make a successful business venture and a fun place to play golf. Novickas, 37, and Darlene, 36, met at LPGA clinics years ago. Novickas is intimidating yet shy. Sommer, talkative and friendly. The did not get along at first but soon became friends after golfing together several times. Now, they run the golf course together in the summer and both live in a four bedroom, two living room apartment above the clubhouse along with Novickas parents. In the winter, they each have condiminiumsat the same country club in Naples, Florida.

Hillendale Golf Club sits directly west of Cayuga Lake in Ithaca, a mix of rolling hills on the front side and tight, tree-lined fairways on the back. Novickas opens the course at 6:00 am. Sommer closes at 11:00 pm.

The course is public, but it also has about 200 members. When Novickas arrived in 1982, five cars in the parking lot meant a busy Saturday. At age 23, Novickas invested in the course with a partner, who later sold his share to her, to earn money while she tried to make the Tour. When the course went bankrupt, she gave up her dream to salvage it.

A native of Detroit, Mich., Novickas had never been to Ithaca. She and her father, Frank, now the course superintendent, were horrified when they arrived. Broken bottles litteres the club house, which had no water or electricity. They found broken pipes, crumbling walls and rotten food in the walk-in freezer. The course was a sea of dandelions. There were no golf carts or lawnmowers. And she couldn't get credit from the bank to fix it. "I was stuck," Novickas said. "The most frustrating part about it is I thought I could have made the Tour." Novickas and her father spent their own money and time making the place presentable, living in the parking lot for three weeks.

To get people to play at the then nine hole course, Novickas went into the streets of downtown Ithaca and handed out free passes. "It took time to overcome the course's bad reputation. It took perseverance and a lot of backbone to survive," Frank Novickas said.

Three years later, in 1985, Sommer came to help for the summer. She never left. "This place just gets under you skin," she said. Sommer had been a high school teacher and then taught golf at a private club in New Jersey. She was going through a divorce when she moved to Ithaca.

In those days, Sommer would give lessons all day and tend bar at night. Novickas would do just about everything else. "There's not a thing I haven't seen her do," said Ron Matthews, a former Hillendale employee who is now a project superintendent for Wadsworth Golf Construction Company.

They built a membership by offering good deals and the promise of fun. They started with cheap lessons and free club fitting. Novickas invented the dollar a hole program, which allows beginners to adjust to the game by paying as they go. They run a breakfast special which includes breakfast, green fees and a cart for two. Their annual barbeque features a joke contest and best dressed contest. When they needed to clear the land of rocks before planting the seeds on the back nine, they held rock picking parties for members. Those members who picked rocks got to play first on the back nine aptly named Rock Open.

"People drive from miles around to play golf there," said Central New York PGA executive director Ron Stepanek. "It's a blast."

Novickas and Sommer had built enough business to pack the golf course, but it still wasn't making money. In 1989, Novickas decided to build nine more holes. She couldn't afford to hire an architect, so she designed it herself. Sommer flew over the land in an antique, wooden-propeller airplane owned by a member to photograph the 80 acres of undeveloped land. They lay of the land dictated the course.

They visited Kiawah Island, the site of the 1991 Ryder Cup, to watch the construction of The Ocean Course, designed by Pete Dye. Matthews, who worked at Hillendale, worked for dye at the time, and he tutored the women in irrigation and drainage technology. Then Novickas ran the trenching machine and Sommer laid almost all of the 10,000 feet of irrigation pipes. They shoveled, raked, and oversaw the bulldozers. To design the greens, Novickas made a circle of white paint on the ground and told the construction crew how she wanted the green to undulate. After the members cleared the land of rocks, Novickas' mother, Loretta, seeded every tree and green. The nine holes opened in 1991, and Novickas saved about $200,000.

She is still redesigning. Stone walls dot the back nine, along with a gazebo, flower boxes and wetlands. Next she'll revamp the front nine - complete with a waterfall.

"The only way we're going to make this place go is to never stop," Sommer said.