Chris Hasenzahl, the CGA’s Volunteer of the Year, has plenty of ‘drive’ when it comes to course rating; Parker Golf Association making a habit of being named CGA Club of the Year
By Gary Baines – 12/3/2025
For a guy who’s retired, has a considerable interest in golf and hits many golf shots, Chris Hasenzahl doesn’t play a tremendous number of traditional rounds.
You know, the kind of golf where a person shoots a given score for nine or 18 holes. Hasenzahl may play a couple of rounds per week during the season when it comes to that kind of golf. It’s a decent amount, but many retirees play considerably more.
Despite that, Hasenzahl spends a great amount of time on golf courses and paying particular attention to their features and relative difficulty.
Such is the life of a course rater — particularly a course rating captain for the CGA.
Hasenzahl has served as a course rater for about a decade — and as a captain since 2020. Asked recently how many course rates he’s participated in over that time, Hasenzahl said the number exceeds 200, including 30 or so in 2025. Even given that he’s done some courses more than once, he estimates the number of different courses in Colorado and Wyoming he’s helped rate is in the 175-180 range over the last 10 years.
Considering there are roughly 300 golf courses combined in Colorado and Wyoming, that’s a pretty big number — and way more courses than the average golfer in the region likely sees.
“I’m retired, so I’ll go anywhere,” Hasenzahl noted in a recent phone conversation.
With CGA raters these days doing their thing not only on Colorado courses but in the Cowboy State, some cover a lot of territory over the roads. And that certainly includes Hasenzahl.
Asked where his volunteer course rating duties have taken him recently, the Highlands Ranch-based Hasenzahl noted Cody, Wyo. (not far from the Montana border); Ridgway in southwest Colorado; Montrose; Grand Junction; Alamosa and Granby. And that just scratches the surface.
“It’s a lot of time on the road,” he said, pointing to that trip to Cody. “We went up and stayed there several days and we worked at a couple of 18-hole courses and then several nine-hole courses. So that was a long trip because I think we traveled on Sunday — because it’s such a long drive — and then we worked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then drove back Thursday. … There’s just so much driving through that state (of Wyoming) and jumping around to different courses.”
Hasenzahl (fourth from right) and a team rate a course in Wyoming.
It’s for dedication such as that that Hasenzahl recently was named the CGA’s Volunteer of the Year. The 68-year-old was among those recognized on Nov. 23 at the CGA’s Medal of Excellence ceremony at The Inverness in Englewood.
“I was really surprised to get it, but it’s such an honor,” Hasenzahl said of the VOY award. “I’m very humbled to get it because I realize that CGA, like other golf organizations, has lots of volunteers who also put in a lot of time and hard work and I’m just so humbled that Aaron (Guereca, the CGA’s managing director of club & facility services) would put me in for the award.
“We have a great team. Aaron and Maddie (Jaworsky, the CGA’s manager of club & facility services) are great leaders of our team. We have a good group of captains and a group of volunteers. They’re very dedicated, very hard-working, very knowledgeable. Everybody puts in a lot of effort and a lot of time.”
Indeed, Hasenzahl said the CGA course rating committee includes about 40 people — staffers Guereca and Jaworsky and the rest volunteers, with about eight of them being captains.
USGA Allied Golf Associations such as the CGA are responsible for training staff and volunteers for conducting the on-course rating of all golf courses within their jurisdiction, which in the CGA’s case now includes both Colorado and Wyoming. Raters evaluate the playing difficulty of a course for scratch golfers and bogey golfers from the various tee boxes, based on yardage, effective playing length and obstacles/challenges. The idea behind both course rating and handicapping is to make the game equitable for golfers of all ability levels.
Hasenzahl (second from right) pictured with fellow course raters from the CGA.
To do this, a rating team — which can number 10 or more people — evaluates each of a course’s holes based on the factors noted above, discusses issues among themselves, and eventually enters data into a USGA course rating program and reviews those entries. Along the way, the raters often drop balls and hit various shots — Hasenzahl calls it “ratings golf” — to help them in their evaluation. All the raters devote considerable time to the process, with the ratings captain perhaps working 15-20 hours total for a given course, including compiling the data, putting the computer file together and reporting the results.
This is all right up Hasenzahl’s alley. Before he retired in 2016, he was a control systems engineer, often working on airplanes, rockets and missiles. He even worked on the International Space Station project.
“My job was to analyze the data that the aerodynamics people — and all these other groups — gave us and design a control system to keep the (flight of) the airplane or the rocket stable,” he said. “So looking at numbers, crunching numbers and analyzing stability of flight was my job.
“So I’m a numbers guy. I’ve always liked maps and measuring stuff.”
That may take a different form regarding course rating, but that love of numbers and evaluation helped draw Hasenzahl into this retirement role in golf.
“I like going to a course, whether I know it or not, just to try to understand how it was designed,” he said. “I find it interesting, whether it’s a male or female, how that golfer will play a certain hole, where the obstacles are, and how they’re going to try to hit it or whatever.
“I call it kind of an architecture detective. You just try and dig into the details of the course and how the architect set it up and how fairly does it play for both scratch and bogey golfers and where the difficulty is.
“One thing I love about golf, it’s not like tennis or basketball. Every course is different. I just love the variety of the golf courses and just seeing these different courses and digging into how they’re designed and how golfers are going to play it.”
Hasenzahl’s appetite for course rating was first whet by Gerry Brown, who served as the CGA’s director of course rating and handicapping — or some variation of that title — from 2001 until retiring seven years ago. Hasenzahl first crossed paths with Brown in a random way through some charity-related work, and the latter planted the seed that he was looking for volunteers to help with course rating. And when Hasenzahl retired nine years ago, he jumped in head-first.
“My plan always when I retired was just play golf as much as possible,” Hasenzahl said. “But now being on this (course rating) team, yes it’s a little bit of work, but I get to go to all around the state to private courses, nine-hole courses, farm country or whatever. It’s a great way to travel around the state and see some other parts.”
Closer to home, Hasenzahl has long served as the Handicap Committee chairman at his home course — the University of Denver Golf Club at Highlands Ranch — though he’ll soon step down from that role.
Hasenzahl wasn’t the only person or group recognized by the CGA for service and volunteerism at the Medal of Excellence festivities. For instance, Bill McClearn received the Jim Topliff Award — given to outstanding rules officials.
From left — on each side of Mate (center) — Macy Meyer, Bruce Ricci, board president John Kopasz and Jerry Coons represented the Parker Golf Association at the CGA’s recent Medal of Excellence Ceremony at The Inverness.
Also honored was the Parker Golf Association, which was named the CGA Club of the Year. The PGA was recognized once again for living out its motto of “Helping our neighbors through the game of golf”.
When it comes to supporting golf as well as the community, the Parker Golf Association clearly goes above and beyond the call of duty. There are many ways of judging that, of course, but it tells you something that the group recently received a CGA Club of the Year honor for the third time in the 2020s.
The PGA earned the inaugural CGA Men’s Club of the Year award in 2021 and also received the honor in 2022.
And at the CGA’s Medal of Excellence Ceremony on Nov. 23, the organization was recognized for a third time as a CGA Club of the Year.
As CGA chief marketing officer Erin Gangloff noted that day at The Inverness, “We are fortunate to have 99,000 CGA members and 522 clubs and leagues that not only play golf but promote the game to the next generation — through their own service to their communities. Each year, we honor one of these clubs that goes above and beyond the fairway.
“Our 2025 CGA Club of the Year goes to Parker Golf Association. Parker Golf Association’s motto is ‘Helping our neighbors through the game of golf’. And let’s (just) say they have far exceeded that motto. This year, they hosted their signature event, the Fairways of Hope Invitational, which raised more than $30,000 to be given to needy families in the community through the Help and Hope Center in Castle Rock and the Parker Task Force.
“That’s not all. They volunteered at the 2025 U.S. Senior Open at The Broadmoor, took Solich Caddie & Leadership Academy caddies, and contributed $1,500 to the Solich program.
“But one thing that stands out most is the group’s camaraderie. This year, one of their own members was diagnosed with ALS. Immediately, the group jumped into action and decided to donate $5,000 to Duke Medical Center, which is leading efforts to find a cure for ALS. Next year, they plan to do more.
“This is yet again another reason why golf is more than just a sport.”
About the Writer: Gary Baines has covered golf in Colorado continuously since 1983. He was a sports writer at the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, then the sports editor there, and has written regularly for ColoradoGolf.org since 2009. The University of Colorado Evans Scholar alum was inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. He owns and operates ColoradoGolfJournal.com