Nels Quackenbush

     Welcome to the Quackenleague website! I am honored to welcome you today to one of the finest leagues in Sheboygan County. I never played professional golf. Truth be told, I don’t even know the rules. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

     The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of the Town and Country league after the first two years, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another year or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? I naively chose a league that was ran by the Kohler Rec Department, scores, flights, schedules and tee times were all set for us, sounds great, right?  After one year, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea how to play those turtle back concrete greens and beautiful courses at my disposal lay just minutes away and I was here playing with Ed from Tax and Mylan from IT?

     So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could start building a league that looked interesting. It wasn’t all romantic.

     The early years were a heavy burden for the first league presidents, Nels Quackenbush, Evan Gillen and Andy Rindt. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

     My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I moved to Spartanburg in 2006 and I left the league in Evan Gillen’s hands when I was 28. He worked hard, and in four years the Quackenleague had grown from eight to twelve and had an annual golf trip. Well, as the Quackenleague grew we brought in someone who I thought was very talented to run the league for me, and for the first year or so things went well. Then burden became too big for one man, at a Brewer Game in 2012 our visions of the future began to merge and Greg Jastrow, Andy Rindt, John Bowersox and myself created, our Board of Directors.  I didn’t see it then, I thought they were idiots, but it turned out that creating the BOD was the best thing that could have ever happened to the league. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of our league. During the next four years, the BOD would go on to expand the league to 16, add directors, pros, and analysts, a national golf trip, an annual leaders vs. legends competition, a sustainabullitein, enhanced scheduling and scoring, a website and twitter account to name a few.

     I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t gone to Spartanburg. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. Golf is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

     I don’t have a third story, hit them straight, use a foot wedge when no one is watching and in the words of Jason Bechen, "put me down for a bogey."