Dr. Buck Jones (back left) speaks to event management students during the Nationwide Tour's 2003 Knoxville Open

Dressed in his gray collared shirt and khaki shorts with what looks like an oversized tool belt, Hannon totes a white scoring standard into the Knoxville Open’s volunteer tent. Jones, a sport management professor at the University of Tennessee and coordinator for student volunteers at the Nationwide Tour’s East Tennessee stop, slowly spells everything out. Place the standard in your waist belt. Get the results from the green-side scorer. Post the results on the standard. The red dot is for the player whose caddie wears the red vest, blue for blue, white for white.

“If you’re over here preparing to carry a standard, that’s a whole lot different look at the tournament than it is if you watch TV on Sunday and know that Tiger Woods is 8-under,” Jones says.

Jones and the Knoxville Open staff have been trying to teach that to college students since 1997 when his event management classes began volunteering for the annual tournament. Of the 500 volunteers that showed up for this year’s tournament, 72 of them are from Jones’ class. “The enrollment has varied between 70 and 95 over the years,” Jones says. “But these kids are working like 40 or 50 hours a week, so one student is like four volunteers.”

The event management class is a two-week, three-credit summer course for undergraduate and graduate students. Five days are spent in the classroom as Jones introduces the jobs and what will be done at the tournament. The other week is spent at Fox Den Country Club in Farragut, Tenn., a community west of Knoxville, working the tournament and developing contacts with local and national sport managers. “I always believe that it’s not who you know, but it’s who knows you,” Jones says. “Nobody gets to know you in my classroom except me.”

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