Greg Hobelmann has served as superintendent at Smith Center (Kan.) Municipal Golf Course for nearly a year, after earlier working in education, coaching and information technology. Photos courtesy of Greg Hobelmann
Back early in his first career, Greg Hobelmann was part of a remarkable run.
Hobelmann, now just under a year into his second career as a golf course superintendent at Smith Center (Kan.) Municipal Golf Course and one-year GCSAA member, was an assistant coach for the Little River (Kan.) High School girls basketball team that, from 1994-98, ran off 91 consecutive victories.
“Since I was the assistant coach, I was coaching the JV games,” Hobelmann says. “They’d start at 4:30. People would start showing up for the varsity games that followed. By the end of the game, it was standing room only. I thought, ‘Man, they really like watching me coach these JV games.’”
Hobelmann left Little River before that dynastic run ended (it wrapped up in January 1998, but the school still won its fourth straight Kansas Class 1A state title later that year), and as he was preparing to leave, Little River’s head coach, Shane Cordell, cautioned Hobelmann it’s rare for that “0” to the right of the hyphen in a coach’s career record to last long.
“When I left, Shane said, ‘If you enjoy coaching, just know it’s all downhill from here,’” Hobelmann said.
Hobelmann — who graduated from Wichita State in Wichita, Kan., with a degree in music education — departed Little River, smack-dab in the middle of the Sunflower State, for Smith Center, smack-dab in the middle of the United States. Smith Center, in north-central Kansas, is just a 15-minute drive west of Lebanon. Until Alaska and Hawaii attained statehood, Lebanon’s claim to fame was that it was located at the geographic center of the United States, although the marker remains marking the geographic center of the contiguous United States.
Not long after landing in Smith Center, Hobelmann found himself at the center of another fantastic streak. Hobelmann was athletic director at Smith Center High when its football team embarked on an astounding 79-game winning streak, from 2004-09.
That run captured a nationwide following. The New York Times sent a reporter, Joe Drape, to cover it, and he eventually wrote a book, “Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen.”
Though he wasn’t a football coach at the time, Hobelmann still feels privileged to have been at least an ancillary part of two astounding high school athletic feats.
Asked which was more remarkable, Hobelmann pauses.
“That’s a good question,” he says after a bit. “I’d have to say probably the girls. They were just incredible. And there were a lot of really good girls’ basketball players in central Kansas at that time, and we were playing up (against much larger schools). You can’t really do that in football.”
When he was a new college grad, Hobelmann planned to teach and serve as a band director. He essentially fell into coaching.
“In small schools,” he says, “you gotta do what you gotta do.”
He similarly fell into his role as AD at Smith Center, as well as his role as that school’s golf coach.
“I had played a little golf,” Hobelmann says. “I loved the sport. When the job came open to coach, I went to the (then-)AD and said, ‘If you can’t find anybody else, I’ll take it on.’”
Smith Center Muni is free to play for county residents under 18.
Hobelmann eventually took on the athletic director’s job, too, before qualifying for retirement benefits. He retired from teaching in 2022 but went to work as technology director for the Smith Center School District.
He learned back in his Little River days that he had a knack for IT.
“I remember Shane Cordell, the coach, wanted to have stats faster after the games,” Hobelmann says. “That was back in the VHS tape days. We had kids doing stats on paper. I wrote a program on an Apple computer where you’d push a button, and that would add a basket or a rebound or an assist. That would have been around 1993, 1994. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had an interest in computers. I was the IT guy at Smith Center the whole time I was there and doing the website. I just enjoyed it.”
Not enough to do it for long, though. Hobelmann had been a member at Smith Center Municipal GC pretty much since he moved to town, and it had lost two superintendents in recent years, one to another course and one because it “didn’t work out for him,” Hobelmann says.
“I was doing some part-time IT work and getting tired of that. I wanted a change of pace,” he says. “I’d drive by the golf course and see the guys working and thought that sounded like a fun job. When they couldn’t find anybody (to fill the superintendent vacancy), I just figured, ‘I’d better step up and do it.’”
Hobelmann has found the learning curve to be steep.
“I’m learning a lot still,” says the former “farm kid” from Belleville, Kan. “We have some bad soil we’re trying to fix up. I’m still learning — doing a lot of learning.”
Hobelmann says he has learned lots from forays into GCSAA’s online resources, and he frequently calls on Smith Center’s former superintendent as well as other local turfgrass professionals.
“This year was really bad with fungus. We had a lot of heat, then a lot of rain. It’d get super-hot with no wind,” says Hobelmann, 58. “Trying to figure out this fungus stuff … there’s a lot of online resources, but it’s almost too much information. You don’t know what you don’t know. It’s kind of like what you experience with AI. If you ask the wrong question, you might get the wrong answer.
“I don’t regret it at all. It’s a nice challenge. It’s nice working outside. I’ve always liked working inside. The challenging thing for me is the chemicals and spraying and how much you have to know about soils, how much you have to know about diseases. I’ve done a lot of reading this winter.”
Hobelmann still works IT part time for Franklin County Public Schools, which is just over the Kansas-Nebraska border, in the offseason, but as of early January, Smith Center Muni CC — which offers free golf for all Smith County residents under 18 — still was seeing play.
“On December 27th, there were 18 people out there,” Hobelmann says. “It’s a crazy winter.”
Hobelmann’s staff numbers two, but it swells to three in the season. That’s when Hobelmann’s son Alex — who played golf for his dad at the high school and went to state and who now teaches and coaches basketball at Smith Center High — helps out around the course by mowing.
“It’s just the two of us, except when Alex comes to help,” Hobelmann says. “I thought it sounded like a fun job, and 80-90% of it is really fun. Digging up sprinkler heads in the middle of summer, that’s not fun. But I hated to see the course get worse. I didn’t want us to lose our greens. I wanted to keep the course nice and build it back up. It won’t ever be a destination course, but it might be a course people from other places nearby come to play. I like the challenge. I’ve only done this for a year. If, in three years, I don’t knock it out, I might have to let somebody else try it.”
One other thing he’d like to try: golfing on sand greens.
Once more common regionally, sand-green golf courses have largely disappeared, though there’s a cluster of them near Smith Center Muni.
“Mankato, Lebanon, Downs — they all have sand greens,” Hobelmann says, ticking of the names of nearby small towns. “There’s a nice little pocket of them in here. I’ve never played sand greens, never been on a sand greens course, even though there are so many close. Never done it.”
Andrew Hartsock is GCM's editor-in-chief