NANCY DICKENS HAS ENJOYED MANY HALLMARK MOMENTS AS A SUPERINTENDENT, starting with her daring mid-life decision to ditch a desk job with the country's largest manufacturer of greeting cards.

If not for the support from her male colleagues, Michelle Frazier-Feher might not have made it to her 10th anniversary as the superintendent at Boston Hills Country Club.

As a female superintendent she is one of only 81 affiliated with the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA), yet she stresses this is one e-card that shouldn't be judged by its Flash cover. The profession is far from chauvinistic, she notes, and more women will opt to join the ranks once they discover that opportunities do exist.

"If young girls were to call me, I'd tell them it's the greatest job around," says Dickens, the certified superintendent at Kierland Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz. "Sometimes people just don't realize how many great jobs are out there. I think times are going to change. It just takes time."

Since 1999 the GCSAA's female membership has grown from 153 to 216. Among that number are 62 Class A superintendents, 19 superintendent members and 42 assistant members.

Andrea Bakalyar takes off her "I'm a woman" coat even in the face of gender-related adversity.

Dickens, 46, represents the rare superintendent — male or female — who can recount extensive firsthand experience in two distinctly different lines of work.

Several years after graduating from Baylor University with a degree in finance, Dickens joined Hallmark at its corporate headquarters in her hometown of Kansas City, Mo. As an inventory controller, she helped manage $40 million of seasonal products for what she considered a "great, solid employer."

Five years later, her duties had become humdrum. Worse yet, she had a never-ending view outside the fish bowl.

"The grounds around the Hallmark facility are beautiful," Dickens says. "There are beautiful glass windows all around, and I'd just look out, going, 'Gosh, what am I doing here?' I didn't want to work the next 30 years behind a desk."

After several inquiries with local superintendents and a female superintendent in Florida, Dickens quit Hallmark at 32. Her mother and brothers and sister couldn't believe it. "I turned a few heads when I did that," Dickens says.

The decision led Dickens to Pinehurst, N.C., where she worked from the bottom up on the vaunted No. 2 course. Starting at $5 an hour, she stayed at Pinehurst for three years while simultaneously earning a turf degree from North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

"It was a leap of faith in that I had never even actually worked on a golf course when I decided to do this," Dickens says. "Certainly there were moments when I thought, 'Wow, I hope I know what I'm doing.' But I had been around the game and I felt I did enough homework to know long-term what my goal was and what the industry was about."

Her goal: to become a superintendent. Dickens fulfilled that quest in 1996, moving from an assistant position at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif., to superintendent of the club's Dinah Shore Tournament Course and Arnold Palmer Course. Just a year later she moved to Del Webb's Sun City Palm Desert community, where she spent five years "maintaining a small, little city." Her duties included the construction of a second 18-hole course, putting course, softball field and fishing lake.

Since 2002 Dickens has been employed by Troon Golf, first as the director of agronomy at the company's Westin Mission Hills Resort in Rancho Mirage and, since January 2005, as the superintendent at its Kierland club, where she manages 40 employees and a $2 million budget.