BonnerSprings.com

Sunflower Hills Golf Course superintendent Frank Barthol is ready for greener pastures. And he would prefer those pastures don’t look anything like the green he has been overseeing for the last three decades.

“I’m just ready to go look at some turf other than this short turf I’ve been looking at here for 34 years,” Barthol said of why he decided to retire from his position.

Barthol’s last day was Wednesday, March 17. He said his decision to retire was in part motivated by a readiness to move on, and in part by the fact that he had become eligible for an incentive retirement package from the city.

Though Barthol has worked at the golf course for so many years, he hasn’t forgotten how he came to the position in the first place. A Kansas State University graduate, Barthol’s degree was in wildlife biology, and he said he knew he wanted to work with the outdoors from having grown up on a farm. During college, he worked summers at the Wolf Creek Golf Course in Olathe, so he had knowledge of how running a golf course worked.

Barthol got the job as assistant superintendent at the Bonner Springs facility in 1975, when his own assistant superintendent at Wolf Creek got the job as superintendent at Sunflower Hills. He moved up to superintendent 11 years later, in 1986.

Barthol said it was the outdoors part of the work he liked the most and not, despite a common misconception that has grown about him over the years, the golfing aspect. Barthol insists he really is not much of a golfer.

“I don’t get paid to play golf, I get paid to make golf playable,” was a quote he often used to tell people whenever they asked him whether he worked at a golf course because he liked golf.

More of this story can be found in the March 18 edition of the Chieftain.

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