The lives of lifelong Wellington resident Tyler Jolly and current Royal Palm Beach resident Logan Robinson continue to operate in sync. After being classmates at Wellington High School and teammates on the WHS football team from 2013 to 2016, and then continuing their football careers at different colleges, Jolly and Robinson are now reunited, working alongside one another as key members of the scoring team for Wellington-based R2 Innovative Technologies (R2IT), which is the official scoring provider for the LPGA Tour.
While both work for a Wellington-based organization, owned and operated by Wellington residents Bob Rodgers and Rich Schoenfeld, they rarely go to the company’s Wellington office to work. Instead, their job is to travel all over the United States and around the world to work at LPGA Tour events. This year, Jolly and Robinson have worked together at golf tournaments in California, Texas, Michigan, New Jersey, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and, of course, Florida. Their international travels have taken them to various ports of call in Asia, western Europe and Mexico.
While their professional lives may appear to be glamorous and exciting, their days are often long and, at times, arduous. Any given day can often be interrupted by cold and wet weather, sometimes they must climb on a roof to run cables, and they are often on the road for holidays.
As they prepare for LPGA golf tournaments, it’s often necessary for them to crawl under grandstands to install an extension cord or perhaps construct a tripod somewhere on the golf course to erect a repeater, which helps with tournament communications. While these workdays are not conventional, they can be interesting and exciting if you love golf.
“We arrive at the golf course at least one hour prior to the first tee shot, and we often don’t leave the course until at least an hour after the last putt drops into the hole,” Jolly said.
For R2IT, Jolly is an event manager, while Robinson is a project manager. They are usually joined by a third colleague at LPGA Tour events. Together, the three of them train scores of volunteers on how to operate the scoring technology that R2IT provides at each LPGA Tour event. This technology is in the form of cell phones that have been converted into digital scoring devices. With each device, a volunteer assigned to each group of LPGA players will track and report on where each shot was hit from by each player in the group throughout their 18-hole round.
“Each player begins every hole with a tee shot and concludes every hole with a putt on the green, unless they chip their ball into the hole from off the green, which does happen quite often,” Jolly said.
According to Jolly, whose main task is to monitor the flow of the scoring during tournament play, the technology that R2IT brings to every tournament allows the company to track every single shot by every player in the tournament for all four days of any LPGA event. These scores are immediately shared with a large number of media outlets, one of which is the TV network providing coverage of that particular tournament. Each year, R2IT deals mainly with the Golf Channel, NBC and CBS, though the majority of play on the LPGA Tour is broadcast on the Golf Channel.
“Our scoring data is sent immediately to a number of media outlets,” said Jolly, who was a defensive end at an NCAA Division III university in northern Illinois.
According to Robinson, one of his key roles is to be an instructor.
“Each week, my main job is to provide reminders and helpful hints to the many volunteers who are assigned the job of being what is officially called a ‘volunteer walking scorer,’” said Robinson, who was a kicker and punter in football, concluding his collegiate career at Keiser University in West Palm Beach.
During tournament play, Jolly spends most of his time at Scoring Control, which is often located inside the clubhouse at the host course, while Robinson can normally be found at Volunteer Headquarters, nicknamed VHQ. That’s where the volunteers meet to start their day at each tournament. As you would expect, Jolly and Robinson use golf carts to get around the course — and both are quite skilled at driving golf carts, regardless of the brand.
For the most part, if the LPGA Tour is in action on any given week, both Jolly and Robinson can be found on the premises at that week’s golf course.
And when there’s an off week on the schedule, they can often be found back home playing golf at one of the many public-access golf courses in Palm Beach County.
“When you work around some of the world’s best golfers, you can’t help but become interested in golf,” Jolly said. “We like playing the Village Golf Course in Royal Palm Beach, the Okeeheelee Golf Course and the Park Ridge Golf Course.”
So, if you need to contact Jolly or Robinson, you will probably find them on a golf course — either playing golf in Palm Beach County or somewhere in the world on the LPGA Tour.
