DeKALB, IL – It's a refrain heard often in March during television coverage of the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship: "There are over 400,000 NCAA student-athletes, and just about all of us will be going pro in something other than sports." But what if you want to be pro in sports, just not as a player? That was on the mind of Lombard, Ill. native Scott Kraul when he enrolled at Northern Illinois University in 1994.
 
"I thought I wanted to be Jerry Maguire," said Kraul. "It was around that time the movie came out and it was cool. I wasn't good enough at any sport to consider playing professionally, but I knew I wanted to work in sport and around sport because I had played year-round, every sport you could think of, since I was a kid. I just loved sports and culture and competition so that was my focus in college. My major wasn't called sports management but it was physical education with a business focus. I graduated from the (NIU College of Education's Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education) so I took anatomy, physiology, kinesiology and then I had a business administration minor."
 
Kraul played golf and baseball at Glenbard East High School before coming to NIU and was roommates with his childhood friend Danny Salas, a member of the NIU men's soccer team. It did not take long for Kraul's competitive juices to start back up and he soon walked on to the men's golf team.
 
"Golf was sort of like the second or third sport for me, but my neighbors were the golfers," he said. "I made friends with the golf team guys and started going out and practicing and playing golf with them. There were walk-on tryouts and I made the team three-quarters of the way through my freshman year. It kept me competitive and scratched that competitive itch that I had since I was five years old."
                                                                                                                                               
Kraul made his college debut as a last-minute entry for NIU's run in the 1996 Midwestern Collegiate Conference Championship where his three-round score of 256 put him 26^th individually. He appeared in 10 tournaments during his career with head coach Jack Pheanis saying of Kraul in the 1997-98 golf media guide that "there's no better example of how a walk-on can contribute than Scott."
 
For Kraul, however, it was his summer job at Kishwaukee Country Club in DeKalb that got his foot in the door of the golf industry as much as his individualized Sports Business major.
 
"David Paeglow, the head golf pro, hired me in the bag room cleaning golf clubs for tips. That was my first real job in the golf industry. David and I became friends and I worked at Kishwaukee all the way through college. That allowed me to have a place to play in the summers and the membership was great. DeKalb is such a great small town and all the owners of the best businesses in town were at Kishwaukee. The owner's of Eduardo's and Molly's were out there and they offered me jobs so through the winters I had something to do. Golf created that network. Working at Kishwaukee and playing on the men's golf team started to create a social network that sports does."
 
After graduation in 1998, Kraul got an internship with the Chicago White Sox in ticket sales. However, he admits to not being a "cubicle guy". Within three months, Kraul interviewed to be the Assistant Golf Professional at Westmoreland Country Club in Wilmette and was hired. His network grew as Jim McLean, one of the leading golf instructors in the country, invited him to come down to Doral in Miami, Fla. and work there in the winters. Eventually Kraul worked for Nike Golf before taking his current position as the Manager of Player Development for Acushnet Golf, which owns the Titleist and FootJoy brands.
 
"We support elite amateur golfers all the way up until mid-amateurs, which are people who have graduated college. We support college golfers, both men and women, those who are playing competitive amateur tournaments in the summers and winters. The team I manage starts fitting those players for equipment at that level that they start playing national events and they start getting really serious. Those players are generally ranked in the top 50 of their graduating class."
 
"The goal is to get them to play Titleist product but for them to see us as a resource for equipment. It's all custom equipment and you can imagine as they grow, the equipment needs to grow with them as they get bigger, stronger, faster. That's the technical fitting aspect of the job and there's also the player relations, development, talent identification component of it. There's thousands of players that we support and with that, especially when they're younger, comes thousands of relationships with parents, swing coaches, high school coaches, and college coaches."
 
While it may have seemed odd at the time for Kraul to be taking classes in kinesiology and physiology along with the business courses, it has proved beneficial with his work in player development.
 
"It's really important to have that background right now in what I do, knowing not just what the body parts are, how they work, how everything's tied together but also how that matches up with the way people can move and the limitations certain people have in their golf swings. It was very important to have that stuff. That was a huge part of how we analyzed athletes at Nike. We had a lot of talent identification conversations and being able to understand the kinesiology portion of it was really important, along with how the equipment that you put in their hands affects the way they move."
 
When you talk to Kraul, you really get the sense that he found something he's very passionate about how appreciative he is of the roundabout way he's gotten there. His golf network that started in DeKalb has grown exponentially and includes names like Tiger Woods, this year's PGA Championship winner Bryson DeChambeau and a celebrity or two. All this because he wanted to work in sports.
 
"I can't stress enough how sport brings people together, especially golf. If I listed off some of the people I've hung out with, played golf with, that I have in my phone it's unbelievable. For a kid from Lombard, from a simple, middle class family, the stuff that I've gotten to do and see and travel it's all because of sports and golf. I had no clue in college where I was going to be in 10 years, let alone 20, but it's pretty amazing how everything I did in college has led to this."
 
--NIU--