Volunteers help make Celebrity Golf a great event

The celebrities have been gone from South Lake Tahoe for over a week, back to their jobs and families. While they were the attraction of the American Century Golf Championship, the true stars were the volunteers who made it all happen.

Volunteers helped in many aspects. Soroptimists had their food tents and spent every day serving sandwiches, drinks, chips and snacks.

The Lake Tahoe Bike Coalition had a group out each day, manning the bike valet for the 200 cyclists that used their free services.

Mike Frye's team of 350 volunteers covered tournament jobs including score keepers, course marshals, ticket takers and course marshals. Frye, who is with Lake Tahoe Visitor's Authority (LTVA), said his team of volunteers are great. About 200 of them are local (Sacramento, Reno, Tahoe) but the rest come from across the country. Some of them have been coming for 25 years, and they say they'll keep coming back as long as they can.

Emalou Bailey and her husband have volunteered for the annual tournament for so long she can't remember the number of years. She has been on the 7th hole for over seven years. That hole was the scene of the knuckleheads on Thursday. "I love it and am addicted to them" Bailey said of the group of friends at the 7th. "They are okay kids."

Retired local teacher Chris Slaback and her husband have also volunteered for years. She believes this year's tournament was her 15th and her husband's 20th year to volunteer.

Each LTVA volunteer pay for the privilege of volunteering, a cost Frye has been able to keep the same for the last eight years. They each get a nice shirt, hat, free tickets, food and a nice end of tournament party. "It is expensive," Frye said of the party, "but they deserve it."

Perhaps the volunteer group with the biggest, and most unpleasant, job was the trash clean-up crew. Tom Esposito, coach at Whittell High School, has spearheaded the trash crew, or Ecology team as he likes to call them, for years. He has 8-10 adults and 12-15 students working all day long to keep trash boxes empty and bottles and cans off the course. This year, the student volunteers were from the girls basketball team and cross-country team.

They fill up eight garbage dumpsters and four recyclable dumpsters each day during the American Century Golf Championship. Esposito's team empties the 40 boxes from the course into the dumpsters. At the end of each day the problem areas were holes 17 and 18. They'll spend two hours with four carts to remove all of the garbage. Many people are not using trash cans and just leave their cans and bottles along the course. The "Ecology" team definitely goes a bang up job.

All of the volunteers I talked to love their "job" and will be back next year.