19th Hole: Pete Wendt
Pete Wendt, CGCS
Director of Golf Courses and Grounds // Congressional CC, Bethesda, Md.
Pete, drinks are on me … what are you having? I’ll take a Tito’s and soda with a lime.
How have things been at Congressional lately? It has been great! We were under construction on our Blue Course from 2019 through the spring of 2021. Andrew Green (president of A.H. Green Design) did an amazing job with the transformation. It has been incredibly well received. We hosted the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship last summer and it was a great week.
Tell me about your family. My wife Cindy is from the D.C. area. I met her while interning at Congressional through my good friend in the business, Curtis Tyrrell (CGCS, MG). My son Hunter is a junior at the University of Tennessee studying business and having a blast. My daughter Claudia graduated from the University of Maryland last year and works in New York City as a consultant for Ernst & Young.
What do you all do for fun? We love to travel, and we love to ski. Probably our best trip was to Zermatt, Switzerland, a few years ago.
Nice! Is that the furthest you’ve ever been from home? No. I would say Lillehammer, Norway or Istanbul.
You’re a Penn State grad. What’s the best place in State College? Beaver Stadium. A close second was the Rathskeller, but it’s closed down.
Give me some fun Congressional trivia. The first hole was originally a par 6, playing to what is now the second green. During the renovation, we put over 37 miles of drainage and 47 miles of irrigation pipe in.
What is your favorite tool in the shop? I would say a deep tine aerator. So great for all surfaces, especially fairways. Second to that is an RTK Rover that we used through construction — and all the time now — to mark everything that went in the ground and locate it as needed.
Do you have a most memorable day at work? The opening of the new Blue Course in 2021 was such a great day. Conversely, the hurricane that rolled through Kinloch (GC) in the early 2000s and took 600-plus large trees down was one that we would all like to forget.
Fill in the blank: My job is _______. Fun! … Stressful, but fun.