By Ryan Borucki

From the weekly morning mixer to the monthly twilight night, events play a key role at of country clubs.

I learned this throughout my summer internship at the Royal Melbourne Country Club, I have been part of events once or twice a week. Some are pretty standard and others take on a theme and get talked about for weeks. Either way, it's of the utmost importance that each and every detail is planned out. Luckily I had some preparation as part of the Professional Tennis Management program.

Students are required to take a tournament administration class that covers the components of running an event (before-during-after). At the end of the semester, students are required to run their own event from start to finish. This is wonderful practice and provides great experience, but it’s a different story when it's the real deal .

My co-worker and fellow PTM’er, Kasey Grohs and I were given this opportunity on Aug. 7. Similar to the required PTM class, this was a “final” test for our internships.

As we sat down to begin the event planning process, a million ideas ran through my head. But--first things first--we had to come up with a theme and a format. We came up with a theme, Dirty Doubles, for a daytime doubles mixer. After we picked the theme, we checked with the food and beverage department to arrange beverages and snacks for the event, running 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Then we had to get on the horn.

There's a lengthy checklist for planning and running an event. Between trips to the florist and constant phone calls it was a long week. But that’s not what stuck in my mind after finishing the event that Friday morning.

We arrived at 8:30 a.m. to set up for the 10 a.m. start time. As we walked in, our boss, Mike Lardino, let us know we had a voicemail from a lady wanting late entry for the event. We also had to prepare the vase of flowers we bought for the winners and to complete our board of rules; the latter task was delayed because the copier wasn’t working the night before.

Okay, no big deal, that’s why we came in early. The kicker was that Mike told us we had to sweep and line the courts because the grounds crew had forgotten. As we scrambled to make phone calls and get the courts swept, he stopped us, letting us in on his joke: The courts were fine and "the lady on the answering machine" was him!

It wasn’t that Mike wanted to see our heads explode or to watch us fail miserably. Ultimately, he wanted us to understand that we needed to plan for setbacks or even disasters when planning an event. Had the courts not been swept, or a water pipe had blown, or the flowers had died overnight, we would have been in a tough situation.

And that is the beauty of the internship. Kasey and I aren’t stuck with a tennis director or head pro looking to use us as money-makers. Mike, a PTM graduate himself,gave us daily lessons and experiences to help us improve our skills and further our careers.

Please share any similar experiences you have had, as well as the 'ins and outs' of putting together a tennis event.