Tour Guide 2025: 3M Open
Despite being a Minnesota native who now works in his home state, Joe Rolstad, director of golf course operations at TPC Twin Cities in Blaine, Minn., is a well-traveled agronomist.
Over the course of his career, Rolstad has lived and worked in North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota and New York. Those stops include stays at Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Mont., Minneapolis Golf Club and Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, N.Y.
Even with all that experience — including at Winged Foot, which has hosted ten majors — Rolstad didn’t get his first taste of professional tournament golf until he returned to TPC Twin Cities, ten minutes down the road from his hometown.
Now in his fourth year as the man in charge, Rolstad says the experiences he had working all across the country have prepared him for just about anything, including big-time tournament golf.
“Everyone does things a little bit differently,” he says. “The amount of people I’ve met on my journey to where I am today is crazy. I’ve met people at the (GCSAA Conference and Trade Show) and then working at an operation like Winged Foot. I mean, I probably worked with 30 to 40 different assistants, and a lot of us still text and talk occasionally.”
A group effort
The 3M Open is the only professional tournament in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, making it a hot destination for volunteers from around the area. And that’s also with the tournament taking place right in the middle of the Minnesota golf season.
With Twin Cities hosting the tournament — in one form or another — since 2001, Rolstad says he has a pretty large group of volunteers who come in every year.
“We kind of have our key role (volunteers) here every year, and we know their schedules already,” he says. “We’ll send them an email around (early April) asking if they want to come back. Then, every year, we get 10 to 15 new people who are interested and want to be a part of it.”
As part of the TPC Network, Twin Cities also gets plenty of help from agronomists from other network courses. That street also goes both ways, Rolstad adds, as one of his assistants will be at the Mitsubishi Electric Classic at TPC Sugarloaf at the end of April to assist with that tournament.
“It’s a great opportunity, and the TPC Network and PGA Tour do a really good job involving all our assistants to get more tournament support opportunities and see different operations,” he says.
The ramp up
Dealing with Minnesota weather is the biggest challenge Rolstad and his crew face. The club opens for business in mid-April while snow and cold temps are still in the forecast. That makes things difficult, as Rolstad and his team have just about a month before tournament prep starts.
“We go from zero to 100 pretty quickly,” Rolstad says. “I just had a meeting today with Pro Link Sports, and they’re planning to start building the structures on May 5, so we’re talking (less than) a month away and three months before the tournament. And then, the tear-down takes about a month.”
Luckily for Rolstad, Twin Cities was built to host tournament golf, and he has just about everything he needs to be prepared for it.
“We have wall-to-wall car paths, and the course was designed to host a tournament, so we have ample room for stands and everything,” he says. “By now, we’ve gotten pretty much all our inside jobs done. We’re ready to rock. The equipment is ready to go, but we just need that little bit of heat to get going.”
Related Articles
2025 Tour Guide: ISCO Championship
2025 Tour Guide: Senior U.S. Open
Subscribe to Golfdom
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to Golfdom to receive more articles just like it.
