Inside Job – What it is like volunteering at the Ryder Cup
by Logan Groeneveld-Meijer
Anyone who’s ever considered attending a Ryder Cup likely knows what they’re signing up to see and hear, not least of which are high level golf, crowd noise equivalent to a jet engine in volume, and adult beverages that flow like water.
Understandably then, a similarly sought-after capacity to be part of the biennial international golf spectacle is that of volunteering, for which about 4,000 were chosen from a long list of 50,000 applicants.
Patricia Domine, a Northwest resident who serves as a board member of Sahalee Country Club in Sammamish, Wash., was one of them. No stranger to being part of large-scale golf events, Patricia had also volunteered at the 2016 and 2024 KPMG Women’s PGA Championships, both of which were held at Sahalee.
As Patricia will tell you, she and her brother have volunteered for “a lot of things” over the course of several decades, due largely to their parents having heavily done the same. An example of that is seen through her service with the Washington State Hunter Jumper Association (she’s a lifelong equestrian). Whether for such an organization, or a globally significant golf championship, Patricia sees plenty that is noble in the act of volunteering.
“It always feels good,” she explained. “It’s rewarding. You get to see the ‘back’ of everything. It feels good for my heart when it’s something that’s really an emotional thing.”
Volunteering at Sahalee’s major championship last year indirectly led Patricia to Bethpage Black, site of this fall’s Ryder Cup. She worked extensively at the former with Zach Ruley, a fellow volunteer and on-the-ground representative of the PGA of America. Ruley pitched her volunteering for either the subsequent Women’s PGA in Frisco, Texas, or the Ryder Cup at Bethpage. Patricia chose the latter, to politely bypass the heat of a Texas summer.
A brief sign-up process followed online, and Patricia soon received the coveted call, telling her she had been one of the few selected to work the Ryder Cup.
At Bethpage, located on Long Island in New York, a state she had not been to since her college days, Patricia’s volunteering responsibilities varied. Primarily, she helped the lucky ticket holders scan into the event early in the week, which gave her the opportunity to take in the scene around her.
“I was shocked at all the costumes,” Patricia said of what she found most memorable, having seen a group of people in star-spangled overalls cut into shorts. “Some of them had corn cob pipes, a lot of them had straw hats. They were hysterical.”
She also recalled how some European fans were clad in kilts they claimed were from Amazon.
Beyond the fans’ getup, other indicators of the pomp and circumstance were present. Big-name spirit brands like Tito’s and Jameson had their own tent setups, to go with the much bigger one that sold official Ryder Cup merchandise.
Patricia got to see the U.S. and European star players of the show, too, albeit only from a relative distance as they practiced and spoke strategy with their caddies.
“It was a wonderful experience,” she said, “And the amount of work put into it, I couldn’t believe.”
Yeah, the type of stuff that made a crack-of-dawn (if not earlier) alarm worthwhile. At the conclusion of the week, and with her connection to Ruley intact, Patricia began to ponder next year’s KPMG Women’s PGA, which will be held at Hazeltine National Golf Club in Minnesota. A Midwest native, the time-generous Patricia is already pondering if she’ll lend her services.
“I’m thinking about it, we’ll see how it goes,” she said.
In any case, Patricia will always get to keep and wear her fancy Ralph Lauren volunteer gear from this year’s Ryder Cup, the prominent logo of which she says turn heads when worn in public.
“I wore [the volunteer jacket] to the grocery store, and I had about three or four people say, ‘That’s a really cool jacket, where’d you get that?’”
Just another perk of helping with something cool.
