Having started at Myrtle Point Golf Club as a young teen, Kyle Taggart is now helping develop some of the world’s finest golf courses.
“I was first introduced to golf at Myrtle Point through my stepfather back in 1992,” said Taggart. “I started off just getting a couple of junior lessons. Quickly thereafter, I was hired on at the golf course by Cec Ferguson. He was the original general manager, the one who kind of got everything up and running. He brought me in when I was 12, just turning 13 years old.
“I started working in the back shop, taking care of all the members’ clubs, organizing all the underground storage and picking the driving range. And that kind of kick-started all of it.”
Taggart said his involvement at Myrtle Point in qathet Regional District progressed when he was 15.
“The golf superintendent asked me if I wanted to join the maintenance team, doing all the turf care and the agronomy side of things on the course maintenance,” said Taggart. “So, I said, ‘yeah, why not?’ So, I jumped over to that side of it.
“I went through a couple of years of doing that up until I graduated from Max Cameron Secondary School. I didn’t really have a clear direction as to what I wanted to do post-secondary, so I took a year off, and I worked at the Vancouver Golf Club on the maintenance side of things.”
That experience led Taggart into the Kwantlen Polytechnic University turf management program at the Langley campus.
“I signed up and did the diploma in horticulture, with a specialization in turfgrass management,” said Taggart. “From there, it just kind of started snowballing.”
After Taggart graduated from Kwantlen, he went to work near Toronto, at a project called Bigwin Island, which was an old, dilapidated resort from the 1950s or 1960s that was going through resurgence. A developer came in and bought the land, and then started reconstructing the whole golf course, said Taggart.
“So, I got my first full exposure to golf course construction at that point,” he added. “I did that all season, up until the snow came, and got to minus-30-plus and was shut down.”
While in Ontario, one of the students Taggart graduated with at Kwantlen put him in contact with a representative of the Metropolitan Golf Club in Melbourne, Australia. He was offered a position to come over and help with a big tournament.
“Before I knew it, I was on a plane and off to Australia for that tournament,” said Taggart.
While he was working in Australia, he received another casual call from the United Kingdom from another acquaintance, who worked at Wimbledon (lawn tennis and croquet club). Taggart reached out and was able to secure a job at Wimbledon. He went off to London and lived there for six months.”
“I had never done anything outside of golf with respect to turf maintenance before, so doing grass tennis courts was definitely pretty cool,” said Taggart.
After his stint in England, Taggart took some time to travel, but eventually came to the conclusion that he was not getting any younger, so he decided to resume his career in golf. He came back to Canada and worked on various projects in BC and Alberta, more on the construction side.
Eye-opening experience
Ever the wanderer, Taggart looked around for new opportunities and was searching the internet. He did some networking, sent some emails, and before he knew it, was participating in a video conference interview for a job in Dubai (United Arab Emirates).
“Lo and behold, I managed to get an offer,” said Taggart. “I packed up the bags and off I went off to Dubai. I arrived and started the job the first week in 2007. That was a major eye-opener. That was big time.”
Taggart worked at a property that is known as Jumeirah Golf Estates, where two Greg Norman signature golf courses were developed: Earth and Fire. The Earth course was the host course in 2009 for the PGA European Tour end-of-year championship, now called the DP World Tour.
“That was some kind of exposure, a completely different kind of budget, expectations and quality standards,” said Taggart. “It was really raising the bar against anything I’d done before that.”
Taggart then joined a project in Muscat in Oman, which is about an hour flight from Dubai. He spent two years on a project there.
From Muscat he had stops in Egypt and Vietnam, where he worked on a new build signature design from the Sir Nick Faldo design group.
“It was an incredible property, just kind of over the jungle, right on the beachfront,” said Taggart. “I was brought in on the second stage of construction, just helping the contractor with the completion of works and final preparation for grassing, et cetera.”
Award marks career milestone
He came back to Powell River in 2013 when his mother was ill and he also was married around that time. His wife is from the Philippines, so he got married there and was given a job offer at the Dubai Hills Golf Club.
“So, before I knew it, I was on a plane back to Dubai,” said Taggart. “That was a pretty lengthy stint at that project. It was a slow build, and things kept changing. Before I knew it, it was about four years in the making. In the end, it was awarded the best new course in the world by the World Golf Awards.
“So that was a big milestone for me in my career, to be involved in something like that and getting that kind of achievement at the end of it.”
Taggart’s next stop was Saudi Arabia, where he is in his fourth year of golf course construction at a spectacular setting near Riyadh.
Having started off as a general labourer at Myrtle Point Golf Club, he has worked his way through the ranks, eventually finding himself in construction and project management.
“I’m overseeing appointment of the golf course architect, irrigation designers, agronomists, landscape architects, engineers, and then pulling together designs from basically scratch, and then taking the design, going through the tender process, evaluating all the contractors, and then actually executing, taking that plan and building it in the field. So that’s where we’re at now.”
Taggart still finds time to pick up the clubs, acknowledging that the game has changed a great deal since his first foray into the sport. When asked if he is living the dream, he said: “I have no complaints.”
