Keeping score helps volunteers stay connected at Oakmont

“Row 1! Hole 7! Red 1!” Dennis Raetzke yelled up toward the scoreboard on Oakmont Country Club’s 16th hole.

Raetzke, 68, a Rochester Hills, Mich., resident, was the captain of the leader board and “Thru” board on the hole Friday morning. He’s one of the many volunteers spending the week at the U.S. Open, where he was the point man of a five-person team responsible for manually updating a large scoreboard to the left of the 16th green.

“I like golf, that’s all,” Raetzke said. “The history of it, how difficult the game is, just the fun of playing it.”

He used a small digital device, about the size of a smart phone, that updated him with scores throughout the course, and he relayed scoring changes to his fellow volunteers.

While the scores were updated on the boards, relationships were built behind them.

“Meeting all the volunteers [is my favorite part],” Raetzke said. “We’ve got young guys here, older people, and we just mix and talk golf and watch golf and appreciate what’s going on.”

Gerry Dulac looks back on the second day of action at Oakmont. (Video by Matt Freed)

There’s an app for that

As golf balls flew across the fairway of the 15th hole at Oakmont, several spectators in the grandstands remained transfixed by the action in the palm of their hands.

For the second year in a row, the USGA created an app specifically for the U.S. Open, and although reviews have been mixed, its ability to bring continuous updates to any smart phone did not go unappreciated.

Rob Michaels of Ohio alternated between looking at his wife’s iPhone and the golfers teeing off at the 16th hole and said he was grateful he could simultaneously follow Dustin Johnson — a member of one of the two “featured groups” on the app — and the activity in front of him.

Still, the app is not perfect. Levi Larson of Iowa expressed dissatisfaction with the app’s horizontal layout and the broadcast’s focus on the first round, which stretched well into Friday afternoon, rather than the second.

But for spectators who just want to catch a glimpse of a golfer on the opposite side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the app is the quickest way to do so. It includes an interactive map, a leader board and the predictive PlayCaster, which calculates the amount of time until a specific golfer arrives at a certain hole.

Those features arrived in just the second iteration of the app. The U.S. Open a year ago at Chambers Bay was the first in which the USGA allowed spectators to use mobile phones on the course.

Body language

Julie Marshall is not a golfer. But her husband, Bob, works as a golf professional, and her son, Matt, plays professionally, so she knows the game well.

But her best way of judging her son’s performance this week at Oakmont at the U.S. Open is to simply watch how he reacts.

Marshall said she struggles seeing the ball on his drives, so she’ll look at her son’s reaction on the tee box.

“I can tell by his body language whether it’s a good shot or not,” she said, standing next to the fairway on the 15th hole while her son made par.

Matt Marshall’s parents, his wife, Danielle, his brother-in-law and several friends traveled to Oakmont to watch him compete in the 116th U.S. Open. His parents traveled from Carlton, Ore., and they hope to celebrate Father’s Day by watching Matt play in the final round Sunday.

“Matt told my husband … ‘Now this is your Father’s Day gift for a lot of years,’ ” Julie Marshall said, laughing. “Ten years, maybe.”

Andy Wittry: awittry@post-gazette.com. Maya Sweedler: msweedler@post-gazette.com.